Well, maybe here's a clue of something ... Going to my System76 box, which is fully updated as of this morning, including alsa-lib 1.2.5.1-3 espeakup 0.90-1 There is no /dev/softsynth* of any kind. root@minuet 12:40:10 dev#ls -l soft* ls: cannot access 'soft*': No such file or directory Weirder still, there's no /sys/accessibility. My older machine, also updated this morning, but with the newer alsa-lib and espeakup held out of the upgrade, there is indeed a /sys/accessibility/speakup, where there is indeed a soft directory owned by janina:janina, as are all the files inside. And this older box also has: crw------- 1 root root 10, 122 Sep 18 12:08 softsynth crw------- 1 root root 10, 121 Sep 18 12:08 softsynthu But this is the working box, so I don't want to mess with upgrading alsa-lib here. One broken machine is all I can handle for the moment. Does that tell us anything useful? It's beyond my paygrade! <grin> Janina Kirk Reiser writes: > Hi Janina: I and Alex have been working on this issue the past couple > of days. This is what works for now and what the final solution will > be isn't quite clear to me yet. > > With alsa 1.2.5 installed chown the /dev/softsynth devices to the user > using them something like: > > sudo chown janina.janina /dev/softsynth* > > The astriks wil cover both devices. > > Then you need to change the permissions of /var/run or whatever it's > called on your system so espeakup can write the pid file: > > sudo chmod 1777 /run > > Then run espeakup as yourself: > > /usr/bin/espeakup > > We are currently looking into why espeakup doesn't work with pipewire > yet espeak-ng does. It appears that possibly espeakup handles writing > to the alsa sound system directly from espeak-ng. I'm not at all sure > of that yet. It's been a hell of a long time since I looked at 'c' > code so I'm pretty rusty. > > It does appear that going forward pipewire is going to be the > pulseaudio replacement. > > I'm certainly open to ideas on the cleanest way to handle all this > stuff. Possibly running pipewire as root or just running everybody as > the individual user, I don't know. Unfortunately it appears we need a > solution to keep up with future alsa libasound2 development. > > Kirk > > > On Sat, 18 Sep 2021, Janina Sajka wrote: > > > Hi, Kirk: > > > > I'm on Arch, not Debian, but I've had broken Espeakup ever since > > alsa-lib-1.2.5 showed up. Since then Espeakup has been upversioned to > > 0.90, but this has not fixed things for me, though apparently it has for > > Alexander now maintaning Espeakup. > > > > I currently have two functional Linux machines, both fully upgraded as > > of just about half an hour ago except as described below. > > > > The newer hardware will run by hand with the command: 'espeakup -d', but > > it's highly brittle and prone to crash the system so that a three finger > > salute is needed. > > > > If I want console access on this 2020 era box, I have to turn to fenrir, > > which I'm just not as comfortable with--but that's another story. > > > > My older machine is prevented by my /etc/pacman.conf from updating > > alsa-lib and espeakup, and it runs just fine. > > > > So, my suggestion is back off to the latest alsa-lib-1.2.4, and the > > latest espeakup-0.8 you have, and you should be fine until someone > > figures out what's really going on. > > > > For anyone running Arch you want the following in your /etc/pacman.conf: > > > > IgnorePkg =espeakup > > IgnorePkg =alsa-lib > > > > If you've already updated your Arch beyond these versions, you can > > downgrade. You'll find a cache of previous versions in: > > > > /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ > > Just cd on over there as root and check what you have with a command > > like: > > > > ls -1 alsa-lib* espeakup* > > > > You can then downversion with pacman like this: > > > > pacman -U ./[filename] > > > > where [filename] is the full name you got from ls. I recommend using the > > Speakup clipboard to get the command right. > > > > Best, > > > > Janina > > > > > > Kirk Reiser writes: > > > Hi folks: Does anyone have espeakup running on debian sid with > > > libasound2 1.2.5? After I upgraded a few days ago I lost my speech > > > output. I have built espeakup and espeak-ng from the current repo on > > > them with no joy either. > > > > > > Curious minds and all that type thing. > > > > > > Kirk > > > > > > > -- Janina Sajka https://linkedin.com/in/jsajka Linux Foundation Fellow Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup: http://a11y.org The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Co-Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures http://www.w3.org/wai/apa
