installing emacspeak on arch can be a bit of a painful process as with any other distro. The hardest part is the lack of really clear concise documentation to explain how to install things–there are tutorials out there, but most of them are dated. In this tutorial, I hope to give you some pointers to getting emacspeak installed.

Getting started

To get started, you will need a few things. First, obviously emacs is a prerequisite for Emacspeak:

pacman -S emacs-nox

You will also need to install
emacs-gnus-git
from
AUR.
I personally prefer Cower for searching and retrieving AUR packages:

cower --download emacs-gnus-git
cd emacs-gnus-git
makepkg

You will then want to use
Pacman to install the package. If you are unsure of how to use aur, or you do not have cower, you can read the AUR wiki page.

Installing Emacspeak

You can find Emacspeak here. You can either download the latest release as a tarball, or check it out through svn.

If you do not already have subversion installed and you wish to retrieve the source from the svn repository:

pacman -S subversion

after that:

svn co http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ emacspeak


Whether or not you use the repo or the tarball, the steps after this point are the same. Please note: the tarballs are full releases, while the repository may not be in working condition because it is used for development.

Cd to the directory with Emacspeak (either your repository you just checked out with subversion or the extracted directory from the tarball, and:

make configure
make
make install


After you have configured and installed Emacspeak, you will still need to do a few things–one of which is build the speech server. This tutorial assumes you are using Espeak. Before building the speech server though, you will need TCL and TCLX. You can get these from AUR, but again I suggest cower.

cower --download tclx
cd tclx
makepkg -s
pacman -U tclx-8.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

Please note: The next step may or may not work. Since TCL8.4 was not in the repo, we are forcefully making it use TCL8.5 instead.
After you install the packages, from your emacspeak directory containing the source:

cd servers/linux-espeak
make "LIBS=-lespeak -ltcl8.5"
make install

Excellent! Now you have your speech server installed. Now there is only one thing left to do.

Now we need to set the variable that tells emacspeak what speech server to use:

echo "export DTK_PROGRAM=espeak">> ~/.bashrc

Now you either need to log out and back in to insure that your .bashrc is being read in, or:

source ~/.bashrc

You will also need to add any non-root user to the audio group:

gpasswd -a user audio


Conclusion

As already pointed out, the point of this tutorial was to help you gain an understanding of how to install emacspeak on arch. Your milage may very. As always, questions, ideas, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Posted in tech