Re: Emacspeak with eSpeak losing speech on Vinux 4

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

sorry, forgot to address your question regarding why you see greater
stability under root than under a normal user. To be honest, I can't
say. I don't run emacs as root ever. If I need to do anything as root,
either I run inside an emacs terminal and do it using sudo or I just run
sudo inside a gnome terminal and use orca. I just don't run emacs as
root. I might look into setting up emacs to run as root and see whe I
have time. However, there is nothing obvious I can think of unless you
have some unusual permission issues. If I understand your setup, this
could be the case. If you re booting into X and you login and have
speech-dispatcher and orca configured to run once logged in (or even
more so if theya re configured to run at the X login (gdm, lightdm) and
then you switch to login to a Linux console, you are very likely going
to run into contention as different sessions fight for access to the
audio device. 

I also think you said your running vinux rather than default standard
Ubuntu. I have no idea what changes have been done under vinux to make
stuff more accessible. I'm using base Ubuntu with the only real
customization being I  build espeak from the sources and set the default
audio to pulseaudio. 

The more I think about it, the more I suspect the issues you see are
related to running X and console sound stuff together. This is similar
to having two users logged into your system and both of them fighting
for control of the sound device. Your increased stability for root may
simply be that root trumps all and wins the fight for control.

Tim


On Fri, 2013-05-10 at 23:12 -0400, John Joseph Morgan wrote:
> Tim,
> Sorry, I may have misunderstood your message. The last thing I would recommend is to run as root.
> I was reporting something that I thought might lead to a better understanding of the problem.
> I recently moved to ubuntu 12.10 and started to have these problems. I'm pretty sure I wasn't experiencing these problems with ubuntu 10.04.
> Unless I misunderstood, you're having to restart espeak frequently, this doesn't seem to be a very stable situation.
> 
> Can you explain why we're seeing emacspeak and espeak crashing after  a couple of key strokes under a normal user and not seeing any kind of crashing under root?
> 
> I'm running ubuntu 12.10.
> emacspeak 37.0
> emacs 24.1.
> I open a new terminal login with control alt f[1-6], then invoke emacspeak.
> 
>   
> Actually, it's coming back to me now. I used to disable gnome by changing the run level for the login to 3 or something other than the level that brings up the guy. 
> emacspeak and speak was rock solid after that.
> I think gnome is messing things up.
> I used to be able to do this in /etc/inittab, but that doesn't seem to be there anymore.
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> On May 10, 2013, at 10:02 PM, Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Turn it around the other way - what do you do which you cannot do as a
> > normal user. Often, this just means having to make a few minor config
> > changes, such as adding your normal user to a specific group. For
> > example, on some systems, you may need to be a member of the audio group
> > i order to use the audio device. 
> > 
> > The difficulty here is that there are no set rules. It all depends on
> > your distro and how they have set things up. What is generally true is
> > that hardly anything other than software installation and low level
> > actions should require root privileges. Needing to run lots of htings as
> > root generally indicates a configuration problem. 
> > 
> > Tim
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, 2013-05-10 at 21:35 -0400, John Joseph Morgan wrote:
> >> How can I tell if a normal user has sufficient privileges?
> >> I used to do something under /dev/audio, but I can't remember what.
> >> Thanks,
> >> -j
> >> On May 10, 2013, at 8:00 PM, Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> 
> >>> I've never tried running as root with espeak or emacs, so can't comment
> >>> on differences. Very bad idea to run as root and should not be
> >>> necessary. Similar to always having your windows login running with
> >>> admin privs. You will expose yourself to malware and virus issues
> >>> (anyone who tells you Linux and OSX doesn't have malware or viruses is
> >>> talking rubbish). 
> >>> 
> >>> If you are seeing a difference between stability running as root
> >>> compared to a normal user, it might be that the normal user does not
> >>> have the necessary permissions to do things like use the real-time
> >>> scheduler which pulseaudio needs. However, I've not seen linux systems
> >>> having this problem for quite a few years now, so would be surprised. 
> >>> 
> >>> I run both gnome orca and emacspeak with espeak on one system, gnome
> >>> orca and emacspeak with outloud on another and emacspeak with just
> >>> espeak on a 3rd system. All are 64 bit. I've not noticed any significant
> >>> difference between the systems with respect to espeak. On all systems
> >>> using espeak, espeak is extremely stable with orca and speech dispatcher
> >>> and unstable with emacspeak. I also find espeak is very stable using
> >>> speechd-el. 
> >>> 
> >>> Tim
> >>> On Fri, 2013-05-10 at 19:17 -0400, John Joseph Morgan wrote:
> >>>> I see this too with espeak. It seems to go away when I run emacspeak with espeak under the root user.
> >>>> I have gnome started with orca at boot up. Is gnome and orca interfering somehow with a non-root user's use of espeak?
> >>>> John
> >>>> 
> >>>> On May 10, 2013, at 6:43 PM, Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> You can just use the dmesg command in a terminal. 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> I also see the regular loss of speech with espeak. I have never been
> >>>>> able to track down the issue, though I tend to get distracted with other
> >>>>> things when I try. I don't see this crashing with speechd or with espeak
> >>>>> and speech-dispatcher generally. It is limited to the emacspeak espeak
> >>>>> interface. 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> I find disabling character echo can help a bit. Otherwise, I've just
> >>>>> gotten use to hitting C-e C-s to restart espeak when it stops
> >>>>> responding. 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> I have noticed that I don't see this issue with the experiments I've
> >>>>> done that don't use tcl as the interface language. So it could be that
> >>>>> the problem is in the tcl layer, but this is just more guesswork.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> Tim
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> On Fri, 2013-05-10 at 11:50 +1000, Jason White wrote:
> >>>>>> Christopher Chaltain <chaltain@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>>> I don't see this file on this system. It's a Ubuntu based system.
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> Ubuntu keeps diverging from every other Linux distribution in a growing
> >>>>>> variety of ways.
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> Try /var/log/syslog. I don't have an Ubuntu-based system so I'm guessing here.
> >>>>>> 
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> >>>>>> 
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> 
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> >>>>> 
> >>>> 
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >> 
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> > 
> > 
> 
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