for those who want console speech in manjaro based distros

[Chris Brannon]

Mark Peveto <southernprince73 at gmail.com> writes:

> sudo downgrade espeak
> That's right, the newer versions of espeak won't allow console speech
> to work.

Hi Mark,
I saw this message and remembered that Manjaro and Sonar are using
espeak-ng, which is a fork of espeak.
One of the things that changed with espeak-ng is the way audio is
handled.  Actually, espeak-ng uses its very own audio library.
So I decided to take it for a spin tonight.
I built a custom copy of the emacspeak speech server and linked against
espeak-ng, using alsa for the audio.
It doesn't work.
I get messages like "file descriptor in bad state" when I try to make it speak.
I haven't tried it with espeakup yet,
but it doesn't look promising.

This really needs to be fixed.  I'll be delving more deeply into the
issue over the next week or so.

-- Chris