speech-dispatcher, dectalk and permissions

[Cheryl Homiak]

Ok, I checked my pre-login boot messages and found that indeed
speech-dispatcher had not been automatically started at boot-up because of
wrong pid permissions for /var/run/speech-dispatcher. Since the ls -l for
/var/run/speech-dispatcher listed audio and speech-dispatcher, I even
tried adding a speech-dispatcher group
and then changing the permissions for /var/run back to what they had
originally had been. Unfortunately I still couldn't write to
/var/run/(anything) as an ordinary user unless I changed the write
permissions for all of /var/run and I'm not sure I should do that. This
not only affects starting speech-dispatcher but also speechd_up, since
they both use /var/run. so I haven't decided what to do about that other
than to keep starting the programs as root for now. I suppose I either
need to remove the symlink form /etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher so it
doesn't load at boot, or I need to find out what in
/etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher would cause synthesizers other than flite
not to work and fix the roblem.

at any rate, once I changed the /var/run permissions back so only root
could write to the directory, debian started speech-dispatcher up
automatically. With debian starting speech-dispatcher automatically, again
the only module I could load with sftsyn was flite. as soon as I killed
speech-dispatcher and then restarted it as root from the command line just
with the command
speech-dispatcher
I was able then to start speechd_up and dectalk came up talking; haven't
tried it with festival yet. I suppose the thing to do is stop debian from
loading it automatically as a daemon if I want to use anything other than
flite with it.
I don't know what distribution you are using, stephen, but if it is being
started automatically, try stopping it after logging in and restarting it.
by the way, it didn't really seem to matter whether I started
speech-dispatcher or loaded speakup-sftsyn first, as long as starting
speechd_up was the final step.
I'm not totally sure why all this makes a difference, but hope it helps.
It seems like dectalk is harder to understand with speakup than by itself,
so i'm not sure which parts of the inflection problem are dectalk-5.0 and
whcih have something to do with dectalk-5.0 in combination with speakup.
personally, I think a pitch of 2 sound better than a pitch of 1.
Do I change pitch, rate and voice in the speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf
file?
Thanks.

-- 
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."