Re: Gnopernicus, Festival, VMware and getting it all working

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel shellworld net>]

The best advice I've read is to first install your choice of Linux 
version.  Next install gnome from the gnome foundation site and get the 
latest version with all of the accessibility bits included.  If you were 
using debian, I'd recommend installing emacspeak and festival and eflite. 
That install installs lots of extra files needed to clean up emacspeak's 
speech, then once that works maybe try gnopernicus after that is done.



On Sat, 25 Mar 2006, Garry Turkington wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After having it on my todo list for literally years I've been trying to get 
> Gnopernicus up and working.  I've been using a Windows screen reader for the 
> GUI side of the world and either a console terminal or more recently Speakup 
> for my access to Linux.  Considering Linux is where I spend the majority of 
> my time it seems silly not to try and maximize my uses of its tools.
>
> So the great Gnome accessibility experiments started this week and my results 
> have been less than stellar.  So I'd like to ask some questions to try and 
> put me on the right path.  Some are pretty specific, others are more in the 
> arena of general guidelines.
>
> My biggest problem is that I can't get Festival to work.  Any time I throw a 
> text string at it I get nothing but a rather stuttered rasp from the 
> speakers.  Nothing even vaguely intelligible.  Sound in general is working - 
> tested that with .wav and .mp3 files.
>
> I suspect my problem is that I've been trying this within VMware virtual 
> machines.  I could believe that the issues around guest/host timing could 
> mess up a speech engine with an internal feedback loop but the fact that 
> normal audio -- and indeed freeTTS -- do speak confuses me.  However, both 
> Festival and a demo version of Cepstral just throw noise at me.  Has anyone 
> ever got either  speech engine working in a VM?  After years of multi-boot 
> machines I swore that I'd never return there and have been relying heavily on 
> VMware for some time.  If I have to natively install so be it but it'd be 
> seriously non-optimal for me.
>
> I mentioned I did get freetts to speak.  That's only using it directly, I 
> never managed to rebuild all the bits I need to actually try Gnopernicus with 
> it.  A Fedora core 5 install couldn't build the Java Access Bridge as it 
> seems some of the AB Java implementations are now out of date with the 
> internal Gnome IDL - a few new methods have appeared in places from what I 
> can tell.  I built the AB on a Fedora Core 4 install but then the 
> gnome-speech build failed, not being able to find some required Java classes.
>
> So, what external dependencies do these packages have?  Are there specific 
> -devel packages, libraries or jar files that need be available at buildtime? 
> Or are they relatively self-contained?
>
> Last question is on what distributions people have had most success with re 
> getting all the pieces working.  I see the Gnopernicus site only explicitly 
> calls out Sun's JDS and Ubuntu for its tested distros.  I'm currently using 
> Fedora (4 and 5), CentOS (4.3), Red Hat Enterprise WS (4) - I'll happily 
> install Ubuntu or JDS  but referencing above this would be much easier if I 
> can do it under VMware.  If I have to install natively then I'll become more 
> risk averse.
>
> Any comments or advice gratefully received.  I've done a lot of googling but 
> I seem to be trapped by the VMware question (I assume) and what I suspect is 
> a version clash with building for freetts under Fedora and I've not seen 
> these issues directly addressed.
>
> Many thanks,
> Garry
>
> --
> Garry Turkington
> garry turkington gmail com
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list