[orca-list] Pulseaudio and speech-dispatcher/gnome-speech in Ubuntu.

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

Ok, in light of all the discussion about pulseaudio and gnome-speech/speech-dispatcher, let me clear up how 
things have been done in Ubuntu for hardy.
* The espeak, cepstral, and dectalk gnome-speech drivers have been wrapped in the padsp utility, to use 
pulseaudio if available. Note that if pulseaudio is not running, these drivers will still work as they would 
normally, i.e through OSS. Espeak is not using portaudio v19 due to some annoying choppiness issues with 
speech under heavy load, which is a portaudio issue.
* Speech-dispatcher is configured to run system-wide, with espeak as the default driver, using ALSA. I did 
not change this, because from what I have read in the past from this list, users are used to configuring 
speech-dispatcher to their needs, which then lead me to believe that all who use speech-dispatcher, know how 
to configure it, and know what they are doing. So if you wish to use speech-dispatcher with pulseaudio, you 
will need to edit /etc/default/speech-dispatcher, dand set the variable there to no, so that it doesn't run 
system wide. You will then need to set up the configuration for speech-dispatcher in your home directory per 
instructions in the speech-dispatcher documentation, and configure things to use pulseaudio, and start 
speech-dispatcher at login. This can be done in your .bashrc file.

I hope this helps, and please note that it is now too late to make any big configuration changes in hardy, as 
hardy final is out next week.

On the other hand, I have some big news for you all, but that is for another email.

Luke