[orca-list] The audio problem again, more suggestions for solutions to it

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
I know that audio has been a problem, and still is (as no proper
solution is yet really available), but here are a few things I
noticed/found out.

To allow gnome to use ESD and system sounds, but also for speech to work
as well, this can be done by getting esd to use the alsa output (on
debian you will need to install libesd-alsa0) and use speech through
alsa (see further comments if you don't know how to).

To get oss apps to use alsa, you can do this with the alsa oss
compatibility layer, you need a package (normally named) alsa-oss, and
then you can launch any app which uses oss through alsa withe the aoss
command (eg. aoss realplay). This requires that you know which app is
actually sending the audio to the sound card, eg. running "aoss orca"
doesn't work (when using gnome speech. Another way to get the same
results as the aoss command is to set the environment variable LD_PRLOAD
with the value /usr/lib/libaoss.so (assuming libaoss.so is in /usr/lib
but it may be in /usr/local/lib or different to that you probably know
as you probably told it where to be installed. I am just trying to work
out the best place to set this, any ideas?

Hopefully that above information should solve most of the sound issues
being encoutered, and probably will get all gnome-speech synths using
alsa, but I probably would still suggest considering speech-dispatcher
(it seems to work fairly well through the orca speech-dispatcher
backend, and would suggest that to be the way to use orca and
speech-dispatcher (rather than the gnome-speech speech-dispatcher
backend).

From
Michael Whapples