Re: [orca-list] need help getting espeak working.

[Jonathan Duddington <jonsd jsd clara co uk>]

On 08 Nov, Darragh <lists digitaldarragh com> wrote:
> Hello all,

> I need some instructions for getting ESpeak working.  

> I'm trying to get it up and running with OpenSuSE 10.3.  

> It is available in the repositories and installs ok.  

> However, when I run espeak on the command line, it complains about
> differences in espeak-data/ 

This means that the eSpeak program is a different version than the
eSpeak data.  Depending on which versions, it may not matter.  If you
installed both from the repository then they should be the same.  But
if you have another copy of espeak-data in your user's Home directory,
then eSpeak will use this in preference to the copy in /usr/share.  So
look for an old copy of espeak-data in your Home directory and remove
it.

> Pluss,  although the configure process in gnome-speech recognises
> espeak, the make processes failes due to it.  

I'm not sure what you mean by "the make process fails due to it".

> I've tried looking at both the source and the pre-compiled version for
> debien systems however I'm not having much success.  

> My most recent problem was with portaudio.  As instructed on the
> ESpeak website, I coppied portaudio.so.2 to portaudio.so That didn't
> work so I coppied it from /usr/lib64 to /usr/lib That worked
> slightly but now it says wrong elf class.  I assume then that the
> pre-compiled package of ESpeak isn't compatible with 64 bit systems?

I haven't used a 64 bit system, but if you use 64 bit version of other
programs then a 64 bit version of eSpeak should be available from your
repository.

The compiled eSpeak from sourceforge is i386, not amd64.

There's an amd64 version of eSpeak from the Ubuntu at:
  http://packages.ubuntu.com

but the "gutsy" version uses portaudio 18 not portaudio 19 (i.e.
portaudio.so.0 not portaudio.so.2).  Other than that, I don't know any
reason why it won't run on a SuSE system.  You need packages:
  espeak, espeak-data, libespeak1

> Any suggestions welcome.  I don't mind compiling it but when I tried
> using make in /src in the source archive, I was told that it couldn't
> find g++ and I couldn't find a package for it either in the OpenSuSE
> repositories either.  

eSpeak needs g++ to compile.
I'm sure that every Linux distro includes g++ in its repositories. 
Look in /usr/bin.  Is there a file such as  g++-4.0  or  g++-4.1.
Usually  /usr/bin/g++  is a link to one of these, but perhaps that link
is missing.

If you have g++ then it should be simple to compile from the source
from http://espeak.sourceforge.net/  using:
  make
  make install

It doesn't have any dependencies other than portaudio.

You can check whether eSpeak is working, without portaudio by doing
these, which done use portaudio:
  espeak -h

This should show help information.

  espeak -x hello

This should show the phonemes for the word "hello".

  espeak -w test.wav hello

This should write speech for "hello" into a WAV file.