ViaVoice outloud on 64bit Ubuntu

["Tim Cross" <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

I've noticed a few posts in the past month regarding running IBM ViaVoice
Outloud on a 64bit system. A while back, Raman posted some information and
added a version of the atcleci.so library builtin a 32 bit environment which
could be used in conjunction with the support Ubuntu had at the time, which
required using the getlibs script to install 32 bit versions of the tcl
infrastructure. 

Last night, I re-examined the situation with respect to Ubuntu 10.10 and
thought it would be worthwhile to report on my initial findings. The good news
is that it is now much much easier to get things up and running. Please note
that this ONLY applies to Ubuntu 10.10, earlier versions still need to use the
getlibs approach outlined in previous posts. 

As of Ubuntu 10.10, the system now comes with multiarch support. This means you
can install i386 packages on the system and they will 'just work'. It is no
longer necessary to use the getlibs script and in many cases, you won't even
need the ia32lib packages (though they are still required in some situations,
but the plan is to eventually remove this form of 32 bit support on 64 bit
systems). 

Note that if you have upgraded from earlier versions of Ubuntu, you may need to
set the appropriate multiarch option within /etc/dpkg/dpkg.d in order for the
i386 packages to show up. Assuming the system has been correctly setup for
multiarch support, all you should need to do to get Outloud working is

1. Install ViaVoice Outloud. I used the current voxin package to do this. 

2. Install the i386 tcl8.4 and tclx8.4 packages. 

3. Copy the atcleci.so library from the servers/linux-outloud/lib directory
into the linux-outloud directory. Do NOT run make etc as you don't want to
build the library. 

4. Use the servers/outloud script, not the servers/32-outloud script. Run
./outloud and all should be OK. 

If you need to build a 32 bit library from the sources, things appear to be a
bit more complicated. The two best options appear to be either to created a
chroot 32 bit environment and build the lib there and then copy it across or
use some of the tools provided in the debian developers tool package. I've not
really looked at this in any depth as yet. Another alternative would be to just
run a VM running 32 bit Ubuntu and do all your builds there. However, in most
cases, it probably isn't necessary to build the libs and you can just survive
with the provided 32 bit version.

The one complication I ran into was compiling the espeak library. I like to
have espeak as a second/backup speech server. I've not yet worked out all the
necessary steps to force a 32 bit build on a 64 bit system. As the tcl libs
I've now got installed are 32 bit ones, the build of espeak fails because by
default, it tries to link against 64 bit libs. I'm sure it is possible, but
I've not yet worked out how. I'm thinking that for now, I'll just be lazy and
build the lib on a 32 bit box, copy it across and just run both espeak and
outloud in 32 bit mode. 

Actually, I have another solution which I'm quietly working on. I've recently
got a working version (though still rough) of an espeak server developed using
clojure, which means no Tcl, just Java and a simple JNI library for the espeak
interface. So far, its working quite nicely and because it is using lisp, you
get all that nice lisp goodness, such as the ability to connect and tweak
things while they are running via the repl etc. Part of why I've done this is
to document the emacspeak server architecture and APIs, which I plan to make
available to help others who may want to develop other servers. 

Tim





-- 
Tim Cross
Information Technology 
University of New England
 Phone: +61 2 6773 3210
Mobile: 0428 212217
   Fax: +61 2 6773 3424
E-Mail: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
   Web: http://www.une.edu.au/itd
---
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Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a
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                                                           âAlbert Einstein






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