Question about Speech-dispatcher

[Tomas Cerha]

Christian wrote:
> Since it is only the 0.6.5 package of SD available on Lenny and I just wanted 
> to learn something. That was all.

Hello Christian,

If you want to learn, you will need to experiment.  I don't know the
procedure off-hand, but I can try to give you a few suggestions.

Create the speech-dispatcher user account first.  Something like:

adduser --system --no-create-home speech-dispatcher

might do the job.  Then make the files and directories used by SD
writable for the user.  For example:

mkdir /var/log/speech-dispatcher
mkdir /var/run/speech-dispatcher
chown /var/log/speech-dispatcher speech-dispatcher
chown /var/run/speech-dispatcher speech-dispatcher

Make sure you have the same directories set up in your SD configuration
files and init script.  The init script (/etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher)
is best to take from the ubuntu package.

You may also need to add speech-dispatcher to the group audio.

You can experiment starting up speech dispatcher that way and see what
happens.  If logging is set up well, you will find the relevant error
messages in /var/log/speech-dispatcher.  If not, SD will write all logs
to STDERR.

There might be other things I forgot to mention, but you should be able
to find that out from the logging messages.  If you manage to start SD
using:

/etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher start

and make it speak using:

spd-say hello

you are done.

Good luck, Tomas