Owen: Re: Software Speech Synth with Speakup -- Help, please.

[Christopher Moore]

Hugh,
I'm not using debian, but the same techniques should apply.  Before you
worry about the startup script, you need to get it working by hand.

1.  Bot with your speakup kernel and festival driver.  I have a separate
section in my lilo.conf so I can type in "festival" at the boot prompt to
force speakup toload the usrdev driver.

2.  Once you log in as root, you need to make sure your soundcard is
functioning.  Try playing a wave file or and mp3 to make sure you have
sound enabled.

3.  Make sure that the festival modules are in your path.  My festival was
built in /opt directory so I used the following command to fix the PATH
variable.

export PATH=/opt/festival/bin:$PATH

4.  start the festival server as a background process.
% festival_server &

5. If you don't get any error messages, your're probably ready to run
middleware.  

% cd /path/to/middleware
% ./middleware &

If all goes well you should hear some speech.  Give us a report.

Chris