Questions about building Gnopernicus

[Adam Myrow <amyrow midsouth rr com>]

Hi.  I just got on this list hoping to get some help with building
Gnopernicus.  I am quite interested in working with it and seeing what
state it is in and what still needs doing.  I have been trying to build it
and am having an awful time getting it to build.

The first question is about supported synthesizers.  As I understand it,
IBM ViaVoice, Festival, and FreeTTS are supported.  ViaVoice for Linux has
pretty much been abandoned by IBM and FreeTTS is in JAVA and my computer
isn't fast enough to use it efficiently.  That leaves Festival.  I have
heard that Festival does not work well with Gnopernicus.  What
specifically is the problem with it?  Does it work at all?  What other
synthesizers are in store for support in the future?  What Braille
displays will be supported eventually?  Is there any plans to support
hardware speech synthesizers?

Well, as for actually building Gnopernicus, I got Festival compiled and it
is working.  I am using Slackware 9.0 which comes with Gnome 2.2.  I
tried to compile the Gnome-speech library and was told that I needed
something called Gnome-common in order to get it to compile.  There is no
mention on the Gnopernicus website of this that I could find.  Anyhow, I
checked out Gnome-common from CVS and in trying to build it, I discovered
it is expecting automake 1.4.  I have automake 1.7.  It even invokes
automake as "automake-1.4."  I finally downloaded automake 1.4 and built
it with "./configure --program-suffix=-1.4."  This created the binaries
and when I installed them into /usr/local/bin, they came out with names
like automake-1.4.  This satisfied the autogen.sh for Gnome-common and I
attempted to build Gnome-common again.  This time, it couldn't find
libtool.m4.  I got around this by making a symbolic link from
/usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4 to /usr/local/share/aclocal/libtool.m4.  I
wanted the older automake in /usr/local so it wouldn't overwrite any files
from version 1.7.  This finally got Gnome-common to build.  I then tried
to build Gnome-speech and it started complaining about being unable to
find libraries for gnome-2.0.  Since I have 2.2, it was thinking it
couldn't find the libraries.  That's as far as I've gotten before getting
frustrated.

So, what do I do now?  Why was Gnome-common designed to call automake-1.4
while its error messages imply that you can use any version newer than
1.3?  Do I have to have Gnome 2.0 as well as 2.2 to get Gnome-speech to
build?  Thanks.