IBMTTS on slackware

Wed Jun 4 17:33:22 EDT 2008

Well your experience seems slightly diffeent with the voxin people, I
got a version of it sent to me which had the encrypted partition removed
when I had contacted them with the problem of the pass phrase not
working.

Yes it would have been nice to have had the packages up to date, but as
I am using slackware I expected to need to compile the supporting
applications anyway for either TTSynth or voxin. There are a couple of
things I am noticing between the different drivers. the
speech-dispatcher one seems to very quickly decide to spell things,
where as the gnome-speech one seems to work a lot more naturally (eg. I
have the list set to digest mode and it comes from
speakup-request at braille.uwo.ca, with speech-dispatcher it spells out the
request word, where as gnome-speech says each word). Thinking about
gnome-speech, when I recompiled it to include IBMTTS I noticed it also
has a driver for eloquence. Why has viavoice become most talked about on
linux, and which is most up to date with current libraries (as up to
date as they may be, which uses the least obsolete), what are the
differences, etc?

From
Michael Whapples
On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 20:27 -0400, Nick Stockton wrote:
> Well the file can be extracted with debian and ubuntu so what you could do 
> is edit the install script and see what commands it is using to mount the 
> image.
> Then you can mount that file under Ubuntu or Maybe GRML I think it should 
> work too.
> then copy the stuff in the mounted dir to a tempory folder and then umount 
> and delete the image.
> After that copy the extracted files back to the place where the image had 
> been mounted I think it's the mnt dir in the voxin directory.
> then edit the installer script and remove the mount and umount commands.
> After that I think it would then copy the files from the dir with out 
> mounting anything and you can just make a tar ball of that package and just 
> use that one if you ever have to install again and junk the one you got from 
> voxin's site.
> I think ttsynth is the better package but I guess when buying cheep I got 
> what I payed for but at least it does work on my debian system now that I've 
> stopped using slackware.
> I think slackware is the most stable of all the gnu/linux flavors but I got 
> tired of having to google for packages and then googling all the packages 
> they needed to run and compiling/installing/configuring them so I use debian 
> now.
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Michael Whapples" <mwhapples at aim.com>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 6:36 PM
> Subject: Re: IBMTTS on slackware
> 
> 
> 
> > On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 18:47 -0400, Nick Stockton wrote:
> >> By the way I'd expect less support than you get with ttsynth if you go 
> >> with
> >> voxin *grin*.
> > I had come to the conclusion before that I couldn't get less support
> > than ttsynth has, as on the ttsynth site it says that no personal
> > support for the product will be given. So I came to the decission that
> > it is best to pay less and chance support than pay more (much more) and
> > know that there won't be personal support for it.
> >> Before I baut Voxin I sent an email asking if there was any differences
> >> between ttsynth and voxin besides the name and the price and I got a 
> >> email
> >> back with a single line saying I should ask on the speakup list *lol*.
> > One thing I think might be different between the two is that ttsynth
> > provides the speakup connector (by the sound of it, it provides it
> > directly rather than working through speech-dispatcher, is that true and
> > how does it compare to going through speech-dispatcher).
> >> I guess when something is $5 you shouldn't expect people to really put 
> >> their
> >> hearts in to selling it to you but I don't think it would have taken long 
> >> to
> >> send a message back with a couple of differences between the two.
> >> Any how in case you want to know the main differenses between voxin and
> >> ttsynth are
> >> voxin came in a tar file with an install script that installed the files
> >> stored in a incrypted image and included debian and ubuntu .deb packages 
> >> for
> >> installing the speech-dispatcher module and gnome speech drivers but they
> >> were already out of date by the time I had gotten them.
> >> Voxin did not come with the libs and header files from the IBMTTS SDK
> >> included which are needed for installing the ttsynth-say,
> >> spk-connect-ttsynth and the gnome speech driver so I had to download and
> >> install them manualy.
> >> ttsynth comes in boath rpm and deb files, includes the files from the SDK
> >> needed for compiling ttsynth-say spk-connect-ttsynth and the gnome speech
> >> driver and the install files wern't incrypted so you can use alien just 
> >> to
> >> convert and install on slackware.
> > That encryption part is now getting me, I keep trying to enter the
> > passphrase and it keeps saying its wrong. I am sure slackware is
> > providing all the encryption stuff (cryptoloop as a module and aes
> > compiled in (although I have recompiled a kernel with it as a module as
> > well)) and I have tried installing it in GRML and get the same. I have
> > contacted oralux for support on this, lets see what my response is.
> >> *grin* that did not take long to write at all.
> >> I went ahead and got voxin anyway as I guessed that it would be the same
> >> product rebranded and thought it would install better beeing in a tar 
> >> ball
> >> rather than ttsynth's rpm and deb packages.
> >> I was quite rong how ever I didn't know that the install files were 
> >> stored
> >> in an incrypted image that was mounted using the install script and I 
> >> didn't
> >> know that it would be missing the SDK which I think should have been
> >> included in with the voxin package instead of a bunch of outdated binarys
> >> stored in debian packages.
> >> I was able to make voxin work with slackware after a while but I'd say 
> >> that
> >> ttsynth had the better packages and I should have payed the extra $35 to 
> >> get
> >> it as it would have saved me lots of trouble.
> > May be I should have followed your advice, but I made the same
> > conclusions you had (with the extra one that surely the encryption won't
> > be a problem) and I spent my $5 (actually 4.29 euro) on voxin. Could you
> > enlighten me on the encryption problem?
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >
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> > signature database 3156 (20080603) __________
> >
> > The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
> >
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> > 
> 
> 
> 