two problems installing software speech with speakup

[Charles Hallenbeck]

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Hi people,

Maybe I should have called this two solutions instead of two problems.  
I am putting together a Debian system for a friend, patterned largely 
after my own, which is working well. But on the new machine, I have had 
a couple of unexpected problems with the software. They turned out to be 
subtle, so it might be well to share their solutions.

1. With festival, speech-dispatcher, speechd-up, and a current version 
of speakup patched into a 2.6.17 kernel, activating software speech 
failed because the /dev/softsynth device was not created by udev on the 
new machine. This happened automatically on my own system, but not on 
the new system.

Solution: On the system that worked okay, the kernel configuration  
specified that sftsyn was compiled into speakup. On the new system, it 
was compiled as a module. Changing this kernel compile option to "y" 
instead of "m" solved the problem. A check of the readme.debian file 
with udev explained the problem, but it took me forever to dig that 
deeply to discover it.

2. Actually I have installed flite, festival, espeak, and dectalk 5.0 on 
each system. But on the new system, only three drivers were loaded by 
speech-dispatcher. Festival failed to load at boot time. On my own 
system, all four loaded at boot time. After bootup, festival appeared to 
be running okay, speech-dispatcher was running okay, all four speech 
systems talked okay using their own "say" commands, and finally, when 
speech-dispatcher was restarted, it picked up all four drivers as 
expected. It was only on bootup that festival failed to load.

Solution: Examining the /etc/rc2.d directories on my own system as well 
as on the new system, they each contained these links:

S20festival
S20speech-dispatcher

But on my own system, numerous other similar links came between them 
alphabetically, which means they were executed after festival and before 
speech-dispatcher. On the new system, only one or two other links were 
shown between the two. It seems that speech-dispatcher was executed too 
soon after festival, and thus failed to find the software. I changed the 
priority of speech-dispatcher from 20 to 81 so that plenty of other 
startup scripts had to be executed after festival and before 
speech-dispatcher, and it now works fine, recognizing all four drivers 
at bootup. 

These two problems are ones I have not heard mentioned before, but their 
solutions seemed straightforward once they were understood. Hope this 
information is helpful to others.

Chuck

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