Re: Compilation of espeak server for emacspeak35 on Debian Squeeze

["Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Janina Sajka writes:
 > Tim Cross writes:
 > > 
 > > Personally, I find it necessary to build espeak from the dev sources and modify
 > > the espeak makefile so that it links against pulseaudio rather than
 > > protaudio. The default debian/ubuntu build is linked against portaudio, which I
 > > find makes espeak more sluggish and unresponsive than necessary. Others have
 > > reported never geting pulsaudio working reliably and I seem to be alone in
 > > this, but it works really well for me (I now use pulsaudio for ViaVoice
 > > outlouad as well and no longer require any .asoundrc file). 
 > > 
 > Interesting. I can see how this could work for Emacspeak users just as
 > it does for Orca.
 > 
 > 
 > Unfortunately, for those of us who also use Speakup, pulse audio isn't
 > an option inasmuch as it truncates audio output as soon as one switches
 > consoles, e.g. Alt-F2.
 >

I've never used speakup, so can't comment on that.
 
 > 
 > It's actually quite quaint in how it resumes playing the stream exactly
 > where it was interrupted when you return to the original console.
 > 
 > But there's another reason why I don't see pulseaudio being acceptable
 > as an adequate solution, namely that it denies audio device access to
 > root. Go figure. /dev/vcs* isn't denied to root, but audio is. May you
 > never see the dreaded "Give root password for system maintenance."

This must be a distribution configuration thing. I just tried the following and
both worked without issue.

While logged into an X session, opened an xterm and did 

      sudo su -

to get a root prompt. I was then able to use aplay to play a wav file with no
problems. 

I then, from the X terminal, while logged in as just myself did a straight 

        su -

to get a root shell and was able to access the sound device without problems. 

However, if I logged into a virtual console as root directly, I could not
access the sound device because I'm running alsa as a user process rather than
a system process. On the other hand, if I just logged into root without being
logged in as another user under a different console, the normal paulse user
process would run and I would have access. Again, I believe this is
configuration rather than pulse not allowing root access.

This is all on a Xubuntu 10.11 system.

Tim


 > 
 > 
 > Janina
 > 

-- 
Tim Cross
Information Technology 
University of New England
 Phone: +61 2 6773 3210
Mobile: 0428 212217
   Fax: +61 2 6773 3424
E-Mail: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
   Web: http://www.une.edu.au/itd
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