Espeakup and Arch

[Chris Brannon]

Austin Seraphin <au at sunbeem.net> writes:

> I just upgraded to kernel 2.6.39 and espeak has changed its default
> output to a different soundcard.

Are you also running gnome?
If you are, then it wasn't your kernel upgrade that broke espeakup, it
was the installation of the pulseaudio-alsa package.
This comes along as a dependency of gnome.
The problem is that it contains a /etc/asoundrc file that forces alsa
applications to use pulseaudio.
espeakup runs as root, and I believe that root cannot start its own
pulseaudio instance.
The quick fix is to comment out everything in /etc/asoundrc.
Then, if you want to redirect alsa applications to pulseaudio when they
run under your user account, edit ~/.asoundrc appropriately.

Hope this helps,
-- Chris