Hi, Marcel: Marcel Oats writes: > Speakup is working fine so far, but even with a USB soundcard also > connected, when gnome starts, I am unable to even start Orca ( for > some reason) so how can I tell it to use a different soundcard? > You actually can do quite a bit, though you still might need sighted assistance if there's some issue on your graphical desktop. First, you want to make sure alsa sees both sound cards: aplay -l Both should be listed. Next, make sure you can play audio to the second card (assuming it's ID is 1): aplay -D plughw:1 [some-audio.wav] I actually keep a wav file in my home directory exactly for testing like this. It's the only file in my home directory that starts with a capital G in order to make it possible for me to use tab completion on the command. The next step, imho, or should I say in my experience, is to insure your audio devices are consistently identified, i.e. which is hw:0, which is hw:1, which is hw:2, etc. So far I've not needed to learn to write UID rules, though that's the surest way. Rather, on my Fedora, I open /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf and put: alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel options snd-card-0 index=0 options snd-hda-intel index=0 alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio options snd-card-1 index=1 options snd-usb-audio index=1 alias snd-card-2 snd-usb-audio options snd-card-2 index=2 options snd-usb-audio index=2 alias snd-card-3 snd-indigo options snd-card-3 index=3 options snd-indigo index=3 alias snd-card-4 snd-pcsp options snd-card-4 index=4 options snd-pcsp index=4 My 0 device, my Intel 810 is the built in audio device on my Thinkpad. I have two USB devices. I don't distinguish between them further, because they reliably load the same each time. If they didn't, I'd have to put more directives in. My third device is a PCM card. Lastly, I find it useful to assign the speaker device to a particular ID. Believe it or not, I've found the speaker loaded as my default audio device on some boots. Go figure! So, this helps keep things consistent, and that's important for reliable performance. For more on what you can put here look at: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-usb-audio BTW: To insure beeps from the speaker you might need to do, as I do on Fedora, open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment out the black listing of the speaker. Here's what's in my file: # sound drivers # #Who cares to do things Fedora's cheap way #blacklist snd-pcsp Now, you start preparing for speech-dispatcher, without pulseaudio, for Orca. So, you need to get rid of pulseaudio. Best not to uninstall it, as something will just install it again. It may be overkill, but I do two things: 1.) In /etc/asound.conf I comment out the call to pulse: #"/etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf" 2.) Next, I trash the pulseaudio binary as follows after becoming root on my system: rm -f /usr/bin/pulseaudio touch /usr/bin/pulseaudio chmod 400 /usr/bin/pulseaudio Next, you tell Speech Dispatcher to use alsa, and to use the particular sound device you want Orca speaking through. In your /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, you have two edits to make: 1.) Find the part that reads something like: # ----- AUDIO CONFIGURATION ----------- # -- AUDIO OUTPUT -- # Chooses between the possible sound output systems: # "pulse" - PulseAudio # "alsa" - Advanced Linux Sound System # "oss" - Open Sound System # "nas" - Network Audio System # "libao" - A cross platform audio library # Pulse audio is the default and recommended sound server. OSS and ALSA # are only provided for compatibility with architectures that do not # include Pulse Audio. NAS provides network transparency, but is not # very well tested. libao is a cross platform library with plugins for # different sound systems and provides alternative output for Pulse # Audio # and ALSA as well as for other backends. AudioOutputMethod "alsa" Note that I changed "pulseaudio" to "alsa" in the directive above. 2.) Tell which device to use. Find: # Audio device for ALSA output AudioALSADevice "plughw:1,0" Note the 1 in hw:1,0 is something I put there. Put the correct ID for your device at that location. Finally, finally, you're ready to configure orca. With your desktop started, and yourself logged in, do Alt-F2 and type: orca -s hth Janina > Marcel > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup -- Janina Sajka, Phone: +1.443.300.2200 sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net Chair, Open Accessibility janina at a11y.org Linux Foundation http://a11y.org Chair, Protocols & Formats Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/wai/pf World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
