I bought a plantronics 510 USB headset a couple of weeks ago. I've been struggling to get a machine with no sound card set up so that it starts talking when I plug in the headset. I finally got it working. 1. Install speakup patched kernel. I am currently using one from Shane's space on debian.org. 2. Install espeak. This actually turned out being critical. I could not get the hotplug system stuff to work with flite or festival. Actually, that may work with newer version of flite or festival but in debian etch, you get flite and festival that depend on oss. But etch runs alsa by default. The alsa-oss module didn't work with the udev subsystem. More on that below. 3. Install speech-dispatcher and speechd-up 4. Add a udev rule to load speech-dispatcher and speechd-up when you connect your headset. This is the tricky part. I can't really explain all there is to know about writing udev rules. A good place to start is here: http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html A couple of things I discovered though: 1. The alsa-oss module is not available when udev rules are run. In other words, there/s no /dev/dsp. So starting speech-dispatcher will fail if you have it configured to use the oss versions of flite or festival. I think you can recompile flite and festival for alsa. Or you can do what I did and switch to espeak. 2. I found it difficult to get udev (aka hotplug) to not try to start speech several times. I ended up writing a script that first checks if /dev/softsynth exists and exits if it does. If /dev/softsynth does not exist, it runs speech-dispatcher and speechd-up. My udev rule: ACTION=="add",SUBSYSTEM=="usb",SYSFS{idVendor}=="047f",SYSFS{idProduct}=="c001",RUN+="/usr/local/bin/startspeech %k %n" My script /usr/local/bin/startspeech: --- Begin --- #!/bin/sh if [ -e /dev/softsynth ]; then exit fi /etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher restart /etc/init.d/speechd-up restart -- End --- John Heim jheim at math.wisc.edu / 608-263-4189 If you are blind and you use linux, please subscribe to blinux-list at redhat.com
