Linux 9 stretch What to do about reviving speakup?

[Martin McCormick]

Willem van der Walt <wvdwalt at csir.co.za> writes:
> Hi again <Martin,
> If I were you, at this point, this is what I would try.
> 1. First make sure espeak still works.
> espeak "do you still talk"
> If it talks, you know that the tts will work.

It still talks.

> 2. apt-get purge espeakup

There's where things seem to be set in concrete:

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  espeak espeak-data espeak-ng-data libespeak-ng1 libespeak1 libpcaudio0
  libsonic0
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  espeakup*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 25 not upgraded.
12 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 79.9 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] dpkg: error processing package espeakup (--remove):
 package is in a very bad inconsistent state; you should
 reinstall it before attempting a removal
Errors were encountered while processing:
 espeakup
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
> 
> This is to try and get rid of the failed espeakup install which makes your
> package manager unhappy.

	The ironic thing is that apt-get is telling me the
package is in such bad shape that it won't be removed.  To me,
that just screams "Let's start over and do it right."

	Until I get past that fallen tree, I can't move forward.

> 3. Grab and build espeakup from git.
> git clone git://github.com/williamh/espeakup.git
> cd espeakup
> make
> make install
> 
> 4. try running by hand.
> modprobe speakup_soft if not yet done.
> espeakup
> press enter and see if you hear your prompt.
> 
> If you do, just put a line that says espeakup in your rc.local and make
> sure rc.local has execute permitions.
> 
> chmod 755 /etc/rc.local
> 
> 5. Check if the speakup_soft module is set to load at boot.

It wasn't right now but I went ahead and added it to /etc/modules
which is what debian uses.  Debian is extremely closely related
to ubuntu.
> 
> On my ubuntu, there is a file: /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf which
> contains a line:
> 
> speakup_soft
> 
> I wou;ld suggest that, if you have such a file, you add the line to it if
> it is not there. If your distro has another way of specifying modules to
> load at boot time, use that.
> 
> If all else fails you can add the line to your /etc/rc.local.
> 
> 5. Try rebooting and see if you still have speech.
> HTH, Willem

	I imagine the rest will work as soon as I get rid of what
is left of the old espeakup.

	I am familiar with /etc/modules from when I couldn't
predict which sound card would be card 0 or card 1. That is what
udev sorts out but the order of the sound devices was different
about 50% of the time until I loaded the module for the on-board
sound card from /etc/modules and after that, the system was as
steady as a rock.

Martin