[orca-list] Arch, Speakup, and Orca

[Robert Cole <rkcole72984 gmail com>]

Hello, everyone.

NOTE: I have posted a similar post on the Speakup mailing list, but I 
also thought that maybe someone here would have more insight regarding 
the issue discussed below.

I have been trying out Arch Linux in a virtual machine over the past 
week or so, and I am really loving it. I installed Arch using the 
modified version, called TalkingArch, which utilizes Speakup. The 
installation went perfectly on the virtual machine. After I installed 
Arch, I updated the system and then installed the 'gnome' and 
'gnome-extra' groups; I also installed 'pulseaudio-alsa'. I then 
rebooted the system, and the eSpeak voice was very garbled. I really do 
not know much about this, but I am wondering if this is some sort of 
conflict between ALSA (which was installed by default on the modified 
Arch version) and PulseAudio (which to my understanding is a dependency 
of GNOME (?)). One of the main messages which I receive at boot is as 
follows:

ALSA lib pulse.c:229:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: 
Connection refused

Orca works just fine under GNOME, but Speakup gives very garbled, 
crackling output.

I don't know much about virtualization (other than the basic features of 
VirtualBox), so I don't know if this could be a virtualization issue or 
not. I wanted to get a feel for Arch before I decided to install it on 
my physical system, and I wanted to ensure that both Speakup and Orca 
would work.

I also want to note that after uninstalling 'gnome' and 'gnome-extra', 
Speakup worked just fine. I also tried installing only the 'pulseaudio' 
and 'pulseaudio-alsa' packages, and the problem arose again.

I am not sure whee to go from here.

I sincerely apologize if this message is too off-topic. I know that 
there are some other arch users on this list, and so I just wanted to 
make an appeal for help.

Thanks for any help which you can provide. It will be greatly appreciated.

Please take care.