Hello, You are correct about the software speech output for speakup, it depends on which synthesiser you want to use as to what software you will need to get it. If you want to use espeak, then use the espeakup software. If you have IBMtts (viavoice) then there is a speakup connector for it at the ttsynth website. If you want to use another synthesiser supported by speech-dispatcher then you will need speech-dispatcher and speechd-up. My experience is that you can use any of the above solutions and still run orca without problems in the graphical console (at the moment I am using espeak as the synth and espeakup to connect speakup to it and gnome-speech for connecting orca to espeak). As for adding speakup to ubuntu, if the kernel version is 2.6.26 or higher (use uname -r to get this information) then you can build speakup as modules. I am not quite sure which ubuntu packages you need to have installed to be able to compile modules hopefully either someone else will say or may be you know. You will then need to get speakup from git or some recent copy of speakup (slackware has some snapshots of the git repository on their ftp server ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/source/k/). Hopefully in that there will be sufficient information to tell you how to perform the actual compilation of speakup as modules and how to install it. Sorry I can't be more detailed about how to install speakup on ubuntu, this is partly because I don't use ubuntu and I am so used to compiling speakup into the actual kernel rather than compiling it as modules. There are some additional things to consider. Ubuntu uses pulseaudio. I feel ubuntu deals with pulseaudio in the wrong manner, sound is a system resource and if pulseaudio is meant to be the way to access audio devices then it should be treated as a system service, they seem to think it is a gnome service. The short of this is that whatever output software you choose for speakup will have to deal with pulseaudio running when you have a gnome session running and also cope with pulseaudio not running when there is no active gnome-session. You may (if you haven't) want to look at removing pulseaudio. You may want to look at other distros (like debian or GRML) which don't impose pulseaudio on you (GRML might be of particular interest as that has speakup and software speech output already configured). One final comment is that you asked whether the entire system will be accessible, this depends what you mean. Using software speech means you will not be able to gain any speech output until the audio system is running properly, on a correctly configured system getting to a point where software speech output can run should not be a problem, but if you are the sort wanting to compile custom kernels then you might get earlier problems. Like wise on the shutdown process you will only keep speech output until the connector software is killed. Again no real problems should occur after that on a properly configured system, but rare things might happen particularly if you fiddle with some of the core components and make a mistake. So basically if you aren't going to mess with things like the kernel you should have access to all you need access to, but if you are going to delve into things like compiling custom kernels you may get problems outside where software speech can run. Michael Whapples On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 08:27 +0000, James & Nash wrote: > Hello. My name is James and I have just joined ths list. I hope I will learn > a lot and hopefully contribute in time. > > Am I correct in thinking that there is a software synthesizer for Speak UP > and that you can have both Speak Up and Orca running on the same system? If > so, how would I go about installing Speak Up in Ubuntu and does this mean > that I could have speech at start up and in every part of Linux with both > Screen Readers? > > Thanks > > James > > >
