eSpeak Problem: PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Jonathan Duddington wrote:
<snip>
>> like play or aplay to play the sound. So if either of these work for
>> you and eSpeak is able to produce audio data (but not play them), you
>> should be fine.
> To test this, you can do:
>  speak -w test.wav "this is a test"
>  play test.wav
Just did. It generates a wave file and I can play it in Gnome just fine. It 
doesn't find a program named play, however. Which reminds me, how do I tell 
whether speech-dispatcher is installed in the first place? The docs state 
that its config file should be in etc/speech-dispatcher/something  or 
usr/local/etc/speech-dispatcher/something but neither folder exists. nor am 
I able to find the speech dispatcher config filee mentioned in the docs with 
the locate command. Ah and I just recently found out that dev DSP doesn't 
exist either, having tried piping stuff to it.

All this makes me wonder whether speech Dispatcher is installed in the first 
place. The fact that Gnopernicus tries to use Festival via speech 
dispatcher, I think, made me think the speech dispatcher program is 
installed. I went with the default Dapper installation.

I've been trying to install speech dispatcher with apt-get with no luck. I 
only found switches to install, not to search packages. Trying speech 
dispatcher with or without the dhash, with under scores and javaCasing does 
nothing. So I suppose I'm using the wrong package name. No luck with 
synaptic and the string dispatcher, either.

By the way, how do I tell whether a package it lists in synaptic is 
installed or not? Ive been looking through the columns in that multi-column 
list but found no text string that would say installed, not installed, or 
something to that effect.

Frankly speaking, I'd really need speech to use Gnome effectively. I'm only 
able to use WIndows for small amounts of time relying on magnification 
alone, because I know that system. There are basically three things that 
make gnome more difficult. First the color scheme. The selection is hard to 
spot. I'd like white text on a black background but something like turquoise 
for the dialog box backgrounds. So far I haven't found a graphical editor 
and the default high-contrast schemes don't work well for me. Secondly my 
Windows magnification program tracks the virtual machine mouse poorly, but 
that's an OT issue. And finally many of the menus like system or 
applications seem to have no underlined mnemonics.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/