<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Delaunay Christophe <<a href="mailto:christophe.delaunay@thomson.net" target="_blank">christophe.delaunay@thomson.net</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi Kevin, Many thanks for your interest to my problem. Sorry, I may not have replied as soon as you'd expect. This is because, after reading your response and others, I tried several things which were suggested to me. But, first, here's my problem: My PC is quite old. It's a Compaq desktop 5100 with A Pentium II running at 800 mHz, 512 MB of RAM and an Intel I810 audio chip. On this PC, I first installed a fedora 9 which worked like a charm until recently. On the gnome desktop, I launch the "orca" screen reader which I configured to say screen content through the ESpeak speech synthesizer. A month ago, after a yum update, the synth began to drop last syllables of what it had to say. For instance, "Welcome to Orca" became "Welcome to Or". Yesterday, I upgraded the F9 PC to F10 in order to benefit from many enhancements of Orca and the gnome desktop from 2.22 top 2.24. As a result, I don't hear ESpeak anymore. I suspected pulseaudio to be the culprit after doing the following. (1) I booted the PC in runlevel 3, (console only). (2) I logged onto my account and issued the following command: script -c startx (3) After awhile, I could hear the login sound and then orca was launched and brailled "Welcome to orca" but it did not speak. Also the screen reader continued to braille, it did not say anything. (4) I logged out X and then, after the X server was shut down, I was back to the console. (5) In the "typescript" file which was generated by "script", I read that some actions required me to have increased RT_PRIO or RLIMIT_NICE capabilities. It was suggested to add my user account to the "pulse-rt" group. (6) I did this by logging as root and entering the command: usermod -a -G pulse-rt <my_login> Then I logged out from root and back in to my account. (7) I started the gnome desktop but to no avail. Of course, I didn't have the warning I had before but always no speech. (8) I then logged in as root and tried to "yum erase pulseaudio". Four dependent packages were also removed. I wrote down their names in order to be able to reinstall them all later. (9) I then logged out root and logged in back to my account and started the gnome desktop. This time, I did not hear the login sound but after awhile, I heard ESpeak saying "Welcome to orc". The synth did not finish its sentence but it talked. Problem: This is the only sentence I could hear. Then, orca was totally frozen: no more braille, no more speech, just as if orca was deadlocked somewhere. (10) I reinstalled pusleaudio and its four dependent packages and tried to start gnome again. This time, I heard the login sound but no speech, just like in (7). (11) I finally tried to modify /etc/asound.conf and to create a ~/.asoundrc in my home directory, as suggested by Paulo Cavalcanti. This time, when I started the gnome desktop, I heard the login sound, then "Welcome to Orc", ESpeak did not finish and Orca was frozen like in (9). Now, I realize that my problem may not be due to pulseaudio but what should I do to have ESpeak work in F10 like it did in F9 please? <div> Many thanks in advance. Have a nice day. Chris</div></blockquote><div> </div><div>I have never used orca before, but it seems to be working fine here with pulseaudio. The difficult part is to make she stop talking ... I also tried espeak, and it is also reading file names via command line. Did you make a clean install or used some kind of upgrade from F9 to F10? </div></div>-- Paulo Roma Cavalcanti LCG - UFRJ