A few questions regarding Speakup

[Robert Cole]

Hello, Jason, all.

Jason, unfortunately I am not completely familiar with the Arch package 
manger (pacman) just yet. I tried to use ignore options to ignore the 
'pulseaudio' and 'pulseaudio-alsa' packages when installing GNOME, but 
it seems that there are too many other packages which have PulseAudio as 
a dependency. There may be a way around this, but I do not know what it 
is at this time.

I did, however, do a little bit of poking around in /etc. I found a file 
named asound.conf, and I am posting its contents [1] at the end of this 
message in case it would be of any interest to anyone (it is not too 
large of a file at all). It seems that this file instructs the system to 
use PulseAudio as the default sound server. Well, I figured I'd just try 
to clear out the file (after backing it up) using 'echo > 
/etc/asound.conf' to see what would happen after reboot. When the system 
rebooted, eSpeak sounded just as clear as it did in the initial 
installation. I also loaded GNOME, and Orca worked just fine.

In all honesty, I have no idea if anything depends on the asound.conf 
file. All I know is that emptying its contents made everything work like 
normal. I haven't done any further testing to see if I broke anything by 
the action which I took. GNOME loads fine, Orca loads and works just 
fine, and Speakup loads and works as normal at startup.

Can anyone shed any light on what exactly the asound.conf file is for, 
and if I would need it? I will also continue researching it.

I want to say that this issue is solved, but I really don't know if it 
is or not as I have no idea of clearing the contents of asound.conf is a 
good idea or not.

In any case, thanks for all of the responses to this point.

Take care.

[1] /etc/asound.conf:
# Use PulseAudio by default
pcm.!default {
   type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
   type pulse
}

# Explicit PulseAudio device
pcm.pulse {
   type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
   type pulse
}

# vim:set ft=alsaconf:

On 12/30/2011 04:53 PM, Jason White wrote:
> Robert Cole<speakup at braille.uwo.ca>  wrote:
>> The garbled voice does not take place until I install GNOME under Arch.
>> I know that PulseAudio will be installed with GNOME under Arch. I
>> completely uninstalled GNOME and then simply installed the
>> pulseaudio-alsa and pulseaudio packages, and the same problem occurred
>> with the garbled voice at startup.
> Can you remove Pulseaudio without affecting any of the Gnome-related packages?
>
> Debian's package dependencies allow you to install Gnome without Pulseaudio,
> but Arch may be different. If it is being started at boot time, you could
> remove it from your init scripts, while leaving the Pulseaudio package in
> place.
>
>
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