Speech-dispatcher problems with ubuntu EasyPeasy on netbook

[Jennifer]

Hello everyone. I have been experimenting with Linux for about 6 months on and 
off but am still quite a noob. I wanted to make orca more responsive and 
snappy, as I am using it on my net book and it is very slow     and laggy, 
particularly on the internet.
I have installed speech-dispatcher and the python interface speech-d. I have 
checked that they are installed and that they are the correct versions. I can 
not start speech-dispatcher as a user or as a system service, note that I have 
disabled pulse audio and am using alsa. I get the following output:
client: speech dispatcher failed to open: connection refused

I have tried the command spd-say "hello" (with and without the quotes and I get 
the same error as above.
 Also when I tried the command speech-dispatcher -d I got a message about not 
being able to create a pid file in the home directory due to the wrong 
permissions. Should I use sudo speech-dispatcher -d or something like that?

Any help or suggestions to links would be very much appreciated. I did find 
some resources on the net relating to this issue but they seemed a little 
confusing.

Thanks
Jen!


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database 4316 (20090807) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

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