[Emacspeak] Re: Emacspeak fails to start under WSL2

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Dengler via Emacspeak <emacspeak(a)emacspeak.org> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Trying to run Emacs 27.1 with Emacspeak commit 3b35ec3 under Debian 11 Bullseye on Windows 11 through WSL2.
>
> Both the Espeak and Outloud speech servers produce speech when running via the shell, but when I try and start Emacs the
> start-up icon plays for about a second and then Emacs hangs.
>
> My minimal init.el is as follows:
>
> (setenv "DTK_PROGRAM" "outloud")                                                                                        
>
> (load-file "/home/codeofdusk/.emacs.d/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el")
>
>  
>
> Any suggestions to help get this going?
>

I rarely use windows for much, so my knowledge in this area is very
limited. However, with the minimal experimentation I've done with WSL I
have found there are some 'unusual' results, especially with regards to
access to hardware devices. In particular, I've experienced network
packet fragmentation problems (requiring smaller MTU settings) and
contention over access to hardware (e.g. sound card), which is likely
very hardware specific.

The first thing I would try is to turn off any additional sound related
functionality - no auditory icons and no playing of the startup mp3 and
no native windows sound events. Basically, ensure only the emacspeak TTS
server is attempting to access the sound hardware. This won't 'fix' the
problem, but might make it easier to identify where issues are. If you
can get Emacspeak to do basic speech only, you can then investigate
adding back auditory icons etc. 

I have also observed some latency when running WSL. However, for me, I'm
running windows inside a virtual machine, so when using WSL I'm running
a virtual machine inside a virtual machine, which makes latency issue
unsurprising.