Ok, I seem to have things fixed for the most part. Let me recap solutions from both the speakup crashing thread, and the whole pulseaudio/gnome issues for anyone else who comes across this running into the same sort of issues. First, as Chris mentioned, the speakup crash is caused by starting speakup with the quiet parameter. I will put reporting this to the debian folks on my todo list, but that's full ATM with more pressing stuff. Ok, as for pulseaudio, like I said before, I did a fresh install of wheezy, and transplanted /etc/pulse/ and /etc/default/pulseaudio from there to my upgraded system. Ok, as for the gnome problems, it might have been one of two things. First, I completely purged all of gnome, and xorg from the upgraded system, having done a backup of the .vdi file first. It got purged so completely that it got rid of espeak along with mplayer. Having ssh access helped get speech working again here. After that I reinstalled the desktop task. Still no joy though. I then created a new user on the system, which I did once before getting rid of x, and ran startx under that user. this time, things seem to launch fine, which wasn't the case before removing x. I then got the idea to run rgrep on everything in greg's home directory searching for "gail-gnome" since I was still getting that error. I turned up this in /home/greg/.bash_profile from way back: export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge:gail-gnome Getting rid of "gail-gnome" from the end of that line, logging out, and then back in got orca talking. The moral seems to be that it helps to have a look at your .bash_profile once in a while. I don't know if this by itself fixed it though, since my new test user was having x errors before I reinstalled x. The fix was probably a combination of installing x from scratch, and editing that line. The only thing I still don't have working is a talking gdm. Yes, I followed the instructions posted here a while back on getting that talking. The problem seems to be somewhere between espeak and speech-dispatcher. I get this towards the end of my /var/lib/gdm3/.speech-dispatcher/log/speech-dispatcher.log: [Thu Jul 4 18:40:17 2013 : 601036] speechd: write() error: Bad file descriptor [Thu Jul 4 18:40:17 2013 : 601069] speechd: ERROR: Can't report index mark! It repeats and repeats. I googled of course, but while there are others having the same problem, there again don't seem to be any answers. The speech-dispatcher log file shows espeak started fine, and espeak.log is empty. Not a big deal, since I can login to gnome without speech. Thanks again to those of who you responded to these two threads for your input. Greg -- web site: http://www.gregn..net gpg public key: http://www.gregn..net/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org
