speech dispatcher not connecting to alsa

[Hynek Hanke]

Rob Hill wrote:
> I did notice that while aplay was running from
> the sd account, I was unable to start another audio stream.
>   
Well, this is strange, very non-standard behavior
and it seems like another manifestation of the
same problem.

Are you sure that in the situation where you try
to run Speech Dispatcher as user (not just spd-say,
the whole Speech Dispatcher), then you are not
actually running the system one as well? To be sure,
first do
   sudo killall speech-dispatcher
then launch the user speech dispatcher and try with
spd-say. Does it produce the famous error log message
about dmix unable to open or does it say that it can't
connect to speechd?
> I don't think I have enough knowledge to determine that pulseaudio is
> definitely not running.
Just repeatedly do
  ps -ax | grep pulse
(at least before and after your sound experiment)
> 2.  Sometimes the message from the dummy output module is spoken.  In
> this case, surely sd is connecting to alsa, but not via a useful
> output module?
>   
Well, dummy tries different ways to output audio, principally
it tries to use 'aplay'. It doesn't use the native speechd sound
library, so this is of little use in your case.

There have in past been similar problems in dmix, but to
my knowledge, they were fixed. It is possible though that
they still persist on some soundcards. Did you try to
upgrade libasound2 to the newest version from Jaunty?

Other than that, I believe that you should contact
the developers of alsa with the above "aplay from sd
and aplay from user dont mix" problem.

With regards,
Hynek Hanke