Getting Speakup working on a server Linux OS

[Garry Turkington]

Hi Kelly/Tyler,

Thanks for your responses.

I do know that espeakup obviates the need for speech-dispatcher and
speechd-up but since I want to try some commercial voices I'll have to
use those as well.

As Kelly suggested getting a vanilla Debian 5 install speech enabled
using the aforementioned Speakup/Espeak/Espeakup was almost
embarrassingly easy.  I've also found that the responsiveness I'm
getting in the install within a VM is vastly improved on anything I
ever saw before in a virtualized environment.  I know VMware
explicitly did work on Linux sound in Workstation 7 but I'm sure
congrats are owed to the Speakup folk too.  Nice one!

Now that I've got a snapshot of this setup I'm now going to play with
speech-dispatcher and speechd-up.  I see that there's a pre-rolled
speech-dispatcher package in the Debian repo but not speechd-up.  I
seem to recall mention of it though, is it in an additional repository
somewhere?  I've not used Debian in anger for... err... 12 years ack
so am somewhat out of touch on the repositories.

Cheers,
Garry

On 11/26/09, Kelly Prescott <prescott at deltav.org> wrote:
> Personally what I do is to use a centos distribution and hand-compile
> a kernel to work.
> then I exclude kernel* from updates.
> I have also used gentoo and debian as well.
> debian is probably the easiest for this kind of thing.
> still, I like the tight rpm integration of cent5.
> Just my $0.02
>
> =-- Kelly Prescott
>
>
> On 11/25/09, Garry Turkington <garrys.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Apologies if a duplicate of this appears, I sent it Sunday but it's
>> not hit my inbox or the archives.
>>
>> I've been using Speakup on a single Linux machine for years, using
>> CentOS 4.x and a Dectalk Express.  This last means I've remained
>> reasonably oblivious to the software speech machinery.
>>
>> In a recent international move however I've had a bunch of equipment
>> die, including my main server and the aforementioned Dectalk among
>> other items.  So this gives me the opportunity to do some
>> rationalization.  Basically I want to Speakup-enable a Linux box which
>> will have as a main part of its role to be a VMware Server host.
>> Consequently I'm looking for a relatively stable OS, ideally one of
>> the server variants out there.
>>
>> With only hardware synths to worry about this would be reasonably
>> trivial as Speakup is my only dependency.  But if I need to use
>> software speech -- and especially with my preference for some
>> commercial voices -- I need get speech-dispatcher and speechd-up
>> working.
>>
>> This is where the server variants get tricky as they tend not to have
>> any of this stuff in the main repositories, or indeed many of the
>> dependencies.  I just installed CentOS 5 in aVM to play with and it
>> looked like this was going to turn into a major self-build activity.
>> Ubuntu Server comes out of the box with no audio and I'm having a bear
>> of a time getting that to work.
>>
>> So, anyone had success with either of the above or got other
>> recommendations?  I've got Debian 5 installing as I type and am musing
>> on just using that booted to runlevel 3 as an interim solution at
>> least.  Basically I want a host OS where the upgrade cycle on
>> dependent packages and kernels is relatively slow, with the server
>> hosting many VMs extended uptime is important.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Garry
>> _______________________________________________
>> Speakup mailing list
>> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>