Flite and sound problems

[Lorne Webber]

Hello Folks.
A while ago I posted on this list about some problems myself and my system
admin were having with getting software speech up and working with slackware
on a dell, and I'm happy to say the admin guy got everything straightened
out with your help.
(I'm just basically passing messages along, as I'm the guy with the crappy
laptop who was bellyaching about not having a serial port, thus relying on
software
speech).
anyway, as it stands right now, I have slackware 10 loaded on the laptop,
and speakup with flite.
Now the problem is the completely garbled sounds that flite is making, and
we're having a hard time figuring out why.
Below is a basic rundown of what he went through to get things to their
current configuration, and in addition, in case it helps, the chipset for
the soundcard
is YMF753, the laptop is a Toshiba 2410 w9x, 1.9 GHz, 256 MB ram.
the full specifications for it are at:
http://www.toshiba.ca/web/specifications.grp?lg=en&section=1&group=223&product=531&part=830
here is what the admin has to say:
---------
Hi,
    Here are the important factors related to Linux, flite and the poor
 speech synthesis we are getting from flite.
 Linux kernel - 2.4.27
 Device driver for sound - i8x0
 Flite - configured with --enable-shared and --with-vox=cmu_us_kal16
arguments
       - compiled with gcc version 3.2.2
 Modules Info
 ------------
    According to info from web the modules that need to be loaded are:
    soundcore sound ac97 ac97_codec v_midi uart401 cmpci i810_audio
    Modules loaded at boot time included       - soundcore ac97_codec
i810_audio
    Modules I loaded using modprobe after boot - sound ac97 v_midi uart401
    Modules I couldn't load                    - cmpci
 Sound Playback Info
 -------------------
 Info of the web indicated that this chipset may not like 8-bit sound files
so
 Flite was re-configured to include 16-bit sound files.  However, the output
 from Flite remains unintelligible.
 Sound device driver plays back .au sound files fine.
----
On a better note, the admin has been keeping notes on what he's been doing,
he's tried the install on a bunch of different systems (unfortunately they
never
had this problem), and when we get things up and running here, I can pass
them along to anyone who is interested.
thanks tons for the help.
Lorne