New to Emacspeak - The Red Hat experience (long)

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Barak,

I had a read of your experiences installing emacspeak with Red Hat. I
have a couple of comments which I hope come across as some
constructive criticism and not a personal attack. 

I think you may have made one very fatal flaw in your approach. That
is, you appear to be someone who skims through the documentation and
then tries to get the system working via making little tweaks and
changes here and there without really understanding what you are doing
and hoping that things will all work out in the end. Around here where
I work, we refer to this as "spiral diving" because this approach
usually leads to increasing degradation of computer stability and
performance until it all just crashes into the ground. I think the
situation was also made worse by Red Hat RPM dependency problems,
which is one reason I moved to Debian - the debian package management
seems to be a lot more sane when it comes to working out and resolving
package dependencies. Having said that, I don't yuse any packaging
system for emacspeak as I like to update regularly from CVS and
emacspeak itself is a very simple package to configure, compile and
install - almost too simple to warrant a package IMHO. 

A vital point you appear to have missed in the documentation is that
there are two tcl packatges - standard tcl and extended tcl. Due to
historical reasons, this can be a bit confusing as the standard tcl
uses the name tclsh as its interpreter while extended tcl uses the
interpreter name tcl. While you may have installed the tcl rpm, what
you really needed to do was install the extended tcl rpm. This is
something which you would have realised if you had read ALL the
documentaiton before embarking on your install. 

A second point to keep in mind is that Linux is a fairly complex
operating system and you really need to know what you are doing before
you start installing different compiler and library versions. Finding
you get an error when compiling some piece of software and then
deciding to install another library or compiler and seeing if that
fixes the problem without first trying to understand what the problem
is will seldom work and you are likely to introduce problems and
instability which is often subtile and difficult to identify. I would
probably go so far as to say never install non-distribution libraries
or compilers unless you really know what you are doing and first
establish that you definatley do need to do this. 

A convention with Makefiles is to have a target called "clean" and
often one called "distclean" or something similar. You should always
check to see what targets are available in a makefile and if a make
fails, you should do a "make clean" or "make distclean" before trying
again to compile the system. If you do a make which fails and then add
some new libraries, programs etc and then just type make again, the
make process will continue from the point at which it failed. This can
result in inconsistencies between the already created/compiled
programs fromt he first attempt and later attempts. Doing the make
clean will ensure you start with all object files and binaries at a
known and more predictable point. 

A very important step to take to avoid the spiral diving problem is to
keep track of what you do and when you make some change in an attempt
to fix a problem, if it does not fix the problem, undo your changes,
re-analyse the problem and try alternative solutions. Failing to undo
changes when they don't appear to have fixed the problem will result
in you moving into an "unknown state" where, if you are lucky enough
to stumble onto a solution you will be uncertain exactly what
combination of changes fixed the problem, plus you are likely to
introduce additional problems which just muddy the waters. 

Finally, an attitude which I've found very useful when trying to get
things like emacspeak working is that if it doesn't work, its
something I have done wrong, not a problem with the software or
hardware. You are working with a software
package used by a lot of people on a wide variety of
platforms/distributions. If you cannot get the system to work,
the probability is very high the error is due to something you are not
doing correctly due to some misunderstanding in the installation
procedures or an over-looked step. Due to the fairly large user base,
problems in the software or its ability to work with certain hardware,
are usually identified pretty quickly. This is especially true with
respect to Red Hat as this is the distribution Raman uses and develops
emacspeak on. As a Debian user, I can expect some minor glitches when
first installing emacspeak due to the slight differences in
installations. Generally, this is fairly trivial to work out and
solve as long as you adopt a methodical approach, keep track of any
changes you do and reverse changes once it appears they have not
solved the problem. 

One final comment regarding your mention of killing comilation jobs
because they appeared to be taking too long or appeared to
hang. Depending on the software and your hardware, comilation can be a
very slow process. Some years ago, I had a linux box which would take
nearly 30 hours to compile the kernel. I admit this was a fairly slow
system with little memory, but it was also with an old 2.0 kernel
which was a lot smaller than the current kernels. Once the kernel had
compiled and was installed the system was very usable with emacs and
emacspeak under a console - I even ran X windows on it from time to
time and it was still usable. With the speed of modern computers, many
people have become use to software compiling in seconds or
minutes. However, this is very much a function of not just the
hardware platform, but also the type of software being compiled. Some
packages can be very slow to build and it is quite rare for a stable
release of something to just go into an infinite loop when it is being
compiled. So, be very reluctant to interrupt a compilation and if you
do, make sure you do a make clean and a re-configure before attempting
any subsequent compilations. When things go wrong, research possible
causes - re-read documentation, search through archives and do a
google for answers etc. Only attempt changes and modifications once
you feel you have a good idea what the problem is and keep track of
what you do. 

Good luck.

Tim

>>>>> "Barak" == Barak Zalstein <bzalstein@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

 Barak> New user Installing emacspeak - The Red Hat experience.
 Barak> Prerequisite: Not much.

 Barak> Introduction: As a supplemental to a previous thread (Advice
 Barak> for a new user) Here are my notes from my experience
 Barak> installing emacspeak on a fresh Red Hat 9.  The ordering of
 Barak> the sections/events is chronological, but not necessarily
 Barak> logical ;-)

 Barak> The first 3 steps may be considered off-topic, people who know
 Barak> their way around GNU/Linux should feel free to skip them.
 Barak> These steps still might be useful if you're in a culture
 Barak> shock, though.
 
 Barak> About notation: I am using the $ (dollar) symbol as the
 Barak> beginning of command lines that I have executed (either from a
 Barak> terminal or from an Emacs shell buffer).  Of course, you'll
 Barak> need to try them yourself because as my familiarity with Emacs
 Barak> grew, I started using dired mode commands instead of typing
 Barak> them in a shell (so I might have forgotten few change
 Barak> directory commands here and there).  I also stopped tracking
 Barak> where I'm root and where I'm not because at one point I
 Barak> started using multiple terminals for that. If you see that one
 Barak> of the commands results with "permission denied" you'll know
 Barak> that you need to: $ su

 Barak> I have written this in a style that should allow one to
 Barak> follow-me follow-me, even if he/she is completely clueless,
 Barak> but someone will have to try this out, (probably with a little
 Barak> rewriting/adaptation to other distributions).

 Barak> Let's go.

 Barak> 1. Download and burn Red Hat 9 CD #1 to CD #3.  One can use
 Barak> ftp.redhat.com or (faster) bittorrent for that.  Note that you
 Barak> can actually buy these CDs instead, as a token of good will
 Barak> toward Red Hat developers.  (I know that Free speech is not
 Barak> the same as Free beer.  But when the price is zero, what's the
 Barak> difference, who cares?).

 Barak> 2. Reboot from CDROM and Install the system.  I have chosen to
 Barak> install using the graphical display and also chose the
 Barak> workstation among the suggested setups (I knew I'll need GCC
 Barak> sooner rather than later so desktop setup would probably not
 Barak> be good enough, I can't rationalize why I didn't choose the
 Barak> server setup, I didn't choose the customized setup because I
 Barak> wanted to get over with the installation as quickly as
 Barak> possible).  The rest of the installation is practically
 Barak> clicking "yes, yes, yes, next, next, next".  I was surprised
 Barak> that the sound test was successful (remembering that Red Hat
 Barak> 8.0 didn't get along with my sound hardware), which means that
 Barak> I will not need to compile ALSA today.

 Barak> 3. Now I was stuck. I couldn't connect to the internet as my
 Barak> USB ADSL modem was not supported by this distribution yet.
 Barak> From my previous GNU/Linux experience I knew that I have to
 Barak> get an eciadsl driver.  Unfortunately, NTFS was not supported,
 Barak> so even if I had the software packages that I needed on my
 Barak> Windows partition, I would not be able to access them.
 Barak> Fortunately I was able to use an internet connected computer +
 Barak> CD burner for getting and burning that ADSL driver
 Barak> (eciadsl-usermode-0.7).  The installation process of that
 Barak> driver, along with mplayer (a video/audio playback utility) is
 Barak> clearly beyond the scope of this text.

 Barak> Let's just say that in order to proceed further with Emacspeak
 Barak> I needed to verify that my system has some basic
 Barak> functionality.  I checked that by using commands like: $ wget
 Barak> www.gnu.org Got index.html in the working directory, which
 Barak> means that my internet connection is OK.  $ mplayer
 Barak> am_I_a_pirate.mp3 If it can play sound files, surely it can
 Barak> synthesize speech.

 Barak> I later also installed lynx so I'll be able to surf and
 Barak> download stuff without going to graphical mode.  I think that
 Barak> this will also help me improve my not-using-a-mouse skills
 Barak> (even though there's nothing wrong with Mozilla or other
 Barak> preinstalled browsers).

 Barak> 4. On with the emacspeak installation: In order to get the
 Barak> software packages that I need, I have used google to search
 Barak> for the terms "emacspeak", "espeakf", "eflite" and just
 Barak> followed the links.  I ended up with the following things to
 Barak> do: * wget
 Barak> http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/emacspeak/emacspeak-18.tar.gz
 Barak> $ tar zxvf emacspeak-18.tar.gz $ cd emacspeak-18.0 $ less
 Barak> README $ make config

 Barak> That command failed with the error: " emacs -batch -q
 Barak> -no-site-file -l cus-dep.el -f custom-make-dependencies "."
 Barak> Cannot open load file: cus-dep.el make[1]: *** [cus-load.el]
 Barak> Error 255 make[1]: Leaving directory
 Barak> `/home/barak/downloads/emacspeak-18.0/lisp' make: *** [config]
 Barak> Error 2 "

 Barak> Maybe the error happend because I was running it from an Emacs
 Barak> shell buffer?  Trying the same command from the command line
 Barak> didn't help.  Check if the README/INSTALL file has something
 Barak> about it.  README points to Makefile, INSTALL file
 Barak> nonexistent.  The Makefile comments tell me that I should do $
 Barak> make config SRC=`pwd` Didn't help. Ok, maybe I'll check it
 Barak> later, trying the RPM package.  $ rpm -i
 Barak> emacspeak-18.0-1.i386.rpm "error: Failed dependencies: tclx is
 Barak> needed by emacspeak-18.0-1"

 Barak> Ok, here's tclx package on cd #3.  $rpm -i
 Barak> /mnt/cdrom1/RedHat/RPMS/tclx-8.3-88.i386.rpm "error: Failed
 Barak> dependencies: libtk8.3.so is needed by tclx-8.3-88"

 Barak> What have I done to deserve this?  (BTW, I saw no graphical
 Barak> tool to handle these specific packages, except for right
 Barak> clicking the rpm file which didn't work neither).

 Barak> RedHat CD #3 contains emacspeak-17.0 RPM, with a similar
 Barak> dependency nightmare.  Going like crazy over every package
 Barak> that seems relevant and doing "rpm -i" was futile.

 Barak> 5. Short break: Interstingly, RedHat CD #1 contains
 Barak> README-Accesibility which refers to Emacspeak.  It also
 Barak> mentions w3 and recommends installing it by $ rpm -ivh
 Barak> ftp://people.redhat.com/jlamb/w3-4.0pre.44-1.i386.rpm Luckily
 Barak> no dependencies this time.  Running it from Emacs doesn't seem
 Barak> to work, though: "Cannot open load file: w3-e21".

 Barak> 6. Completing Emacspeak package build: Let's try Emacspeak 17
 Barak> from source, or shall we go doing something else?  Remembering
 Barak> the original Emacspeak 18 error I tried to locate the missing
 Barak> file.  From Emacs, the command M-x locate, with cus-dep.el as
 Barak> parameter yields: /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/cus-dep.elc Oh, I
 Barak> see. The RedHat installation had a byte-compiled version of
 Barak> the cus-dep.el file that Emacspeak needs.

 Barak> So if I had installed Emacs from source everything would just
 Barak> be fine, right?  $ wget ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs got index.html I
 Barak> browsed it using lynx and learned that if I want to be updated
 Barak> and stable I'll need to get emacs-21.3.tar.gz (I should
 Barak> probably set up my Emacs so that the command
 Barak> browse-url-of-buffer will use lynx as default).  $ wget
 Barak> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-21.3.tar.gz $ tar zxvf
 Barak> emacs-21.3.tar.gz Skimming through the README and INSTALL
 Barak> files reveals that what I need to do is: $ ./configure $ make
 Barak> as root: $ make install And that's all is needed from the GNU
 Barak> Emacs side.

 Barak> So I came back to the extracted emacspeak-18.0 directory and
 Barak> type $ make config Yes!  No errors, and it told me "Now type
 Barak> make emacspeak".  $ make emacspeak Again, smooth, no errors,
 Barak> and it told me: "Now check installation of the speech server.
 Barak> See Makefile for instructions."  And I did.  The most
 Barak> important piece of information is that Emacspeak is using tcl
 Barak> and I should probably have one before moving on to
 Barak> eflite/espeakf.  $ which tcl "/usr/bin/which: no tcl in
 Barak> (/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/barak/bin)
 Barak> ".  Oh no, not again. I was sure that my earlier rpm bashing
 Barak> had installed tcl at least 3 times.

 Barak> 7. Installing tcl Forget the RPM, I'm going to the source.
 Barak> Where can I get it?  Google for "tcl", "download" .
 Barak> www.tcl.tk is the place.  It also has precompiled binaries, so
 Barak> it's ok if I chicken.  Using lynx for downloading the files
 Barak> failed so I had to switch from my comfortable text terminal
 Barak> back to X and launched Mozilla.  I later learned that when
 Barak> using lynx, downloading a file and saving a file are two
 Barak> different actions (one doesn't mean the other, yes to one may
 Barak> be a no to the other).

 Barak> I guess that's a proper place to mention that Control-Alt-F1
 Barak> up to Control-Alt-F6 key combinations switch between various
 Barak> text terminals (easier to read with my glaucoma) and
 Barak> Control-Alt-F7 brings us back to the graphical screen.

 Barak> Anyway, $ tar zxvf tcl8.4.2-src.tar.gz simile with README,
 Barak> unix/README.  $ cd tcl8.4.2/unix $ ./configure $ make as root
 Barak> $ make install

 Barak> $ which tcl still can't find it.  Reading the unix/README and
 Barak> the output of "make install" gave me an idea: maybe I'll just
 Barak> do as root: $ ln -sf /usr/local/bin/tclsh8.4
 Barak> /usr/local/bin/tcl

 Barak> Am I sure that I know what I'm doing? The next steps will
 Barak> tell.

 Barak> 8. Install a speech synthesizer.  Unlike espeakf, I already
 Barak> got eflite to work in the past, so I probably should start
 Barak> with what I know.  Now might be a good time to freshen up my
 Barak> memory with
 Barak> https://www.emacspeak.org/VCCS-archive/msg01099.html in
 Barak> order to prepare for the next steps.  There is no harm in
 Barak> typing $ make install from the directory where I've extracted
 Barak> and built emacspeak-18.0d, as I'm going to use the other
 Barak> scripts anyway.

 Barak> $ tar zxvf flite-1.2-release.tar.gz $ cd flite-1.2-release
 Barak> checking out README (no INSTALL file, but the README has the
 Barak> info) Even if you are not a programmer, It is always
 Barak> interesting to browse the soruce directory.  For example,
 Barak> while checking the COPYING file, I learned that flite is free
 Barak> software but released under a different license than the GPL.
 Barak> $ ./configure $ make No, the computer is not dead. It's just
 Barak> compiling very large files.  Ok, it is stuck for too long in:
 Barak> " gcc -I../../lang/usenglish -I../../lang/cmulex
 Barak> -I../../include -g -O2 -Wall -c cmu_us_kal16_diphone.c -o
 Barak> cmu_us_kal16_diphone.o"

 Barak> Let's change -O2 to -O0 and hope that it will solve it.  $ cd
 Barak> ~/downloads/flite-1.2-release/lang/cmu_us_kal16/ $ gcc
 Barak> -I../../lang/usenglish -I../../lang/cmulex -I../../include -g
 Barak> -O0 -Wall -c cmu_us_kal16_diphone.c -o cmu_us_kal16_diphone.o
 Barak> Few minutes later...  Well, I'm killing it.  (Later
 Barak> Examination of the C file reveals that optimization level
 Barak> probably doesn't matter in this case, as we are compiling a
 Barak> file with very large data arrays).  Compilers, can't live with
 Barak> them, can't shoot them.

 Barak> Let's see if we have any alternative on the system.  $ gcc
 Barak> (and pressing tab instead of enter) Found gcc296, not an
 Barak> _official_ GCC release but still one of my favorites.  $
 Barak> gcc296 -I../../lang/usenglish -I../../lang/cmulex
 Barak> -I../../include -g -O0 -Wall -c cmu_us_kal16_diphone.c -o
 Barak> cmu_us_kal16_diphone.o That almost worked like a charm, except
 Barak> for the following message: "/tmp/ccqPRq3D.s: Assembler
 Barak> messages: /tmp/ccqPRq3D.s:2165899: Warning: .stabs:
 Barak> description field '10002' too big, try a different debug
 Barak> format"

 Barak> I give up building flite, let's see what about eflite

 Barak> $ tar zxvf eflite-0.3.6.tar.gz $ cd eflite-0.3.6 Tired of
 Barak> typing configure make and make install, maybe I'll prepare a
 Barak> script called "the_usual_please.csh" .  But not this time: The
 Barak> INSTALL also tells me that configure needs to accept an
 Barak> additional switch, so I configure it like this: $ ./configure
 Barak> flite_dir=/home/barak/downloads/flite-1.2-release The INSTALL
 Barak> file tells me that I don't need to install flite, I only need
 Barak> flite libraries, so maybe it will work after all without
 Barak> successfully building flite.  $ make Surprisingly, the make
 Barak> process is finished successfully.  $ make install

 Barak> Now I prepare the emacspeak-eflite script as discussed in the
 Barak> emacspeak mailing list archives:

 Barak> #!/bin/sh ## /usr/local/bin/emacspeak-eflite - execute emacs
 Barak> with speech enhancements ## use EFLITE

 Barak> ## based on #$Id: emacspeak.sh.def,v 17.0 2002/11/23 01:29:08
 Barak> raman Exp $

 Barak> if [ -f $HOME/.emacs ] then INITSTR="-l $HOME/.emacs" fi

 Barak> CL_ALL="" for CL in $* ; do if [ "$CL" = "-o" ]; then
 Barak> DTK_PROGRAM=outloud export DTK_PROGRAM elif [ "$CL" = "-d" ];
 Barak> then DTK_PROGRAM=dtk-soft export DTK_PROGRAM elif [ "$CL" =
 Barak> "-q" ]; then INITSTR="" else CL_ALL="$CL_ALL $CL" fi done

 Barak> export EMACS_UNIBYTE=1 #export DTK_TCL=/usr/bin/eflite export
 Barak> DTK_TCL=/usr/local/bin/eflite

 Barak> exec emacs -q -l
 Barak> /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacspeak/lisp/emacspeak-setup.el
 Barak> $INITSTR $CL_ALL ### end /usr/local/bin/emacspeak-eflite

 Barak> $ chmod +x emacspeak-eflite $ cp emacspeak-flite
 Barak> /usr/local/bin

 Barak> $ emacspeak-eflite It's alive!!!

 Barak> 9. Make typing a bit more comfortable.  In order to minimize
 Barak> the number of awkward positions for my fingers.  I needed to
 Barak> exchange the location of Caps-Lock and Control.  (After blind
 Barak> typing for awhile in Emacs, you find out that you move a lot
 Barak> using the Control and Alt/Meta keys, so you want to make your
 Barak> hand move as little as possible before pressing it).

 Barak> Ok, so where is emacs2.kmap.gz?

 Barak> M-x locate with emacs2.kmap as parameter.  nothing, but I
 Barak> found: /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/emacs2.map.gz so opened
 Barak> the directory /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/ as an Emacs dired
 Barak> buffer and executed the shell command on the file
 Barak> emacs2.map.gz by putting point on the start of the file name,
 Barak> pressing the '!' key (that's exclamation mark) and typing
 Barak> "loadkeys " (without the quotation marks).  It worked. In
 Barak> which file shall I put this command so that it will be invoked
 Barak> when system starts up?  I guess that .bashrc is good enough,
 Barak> is it?  I've logged into another terminal and saw that it
 Barak> works.  I'll save the graphical user interface for later.

 Barak> 10. Time to festival.  It's late, give me a decent RPM,
 Barak> please.  rpmfind.net is where to go.  The search engine in
 Barak> that site gave a proper link where to download one such rpm,
 Barak> a.k.a festival-1.4.2-16.i386.rpm $ rpm -i
 Barak> festival-1.4.2-16.i386.rpm Good, let's see that it works.  $
 Barak> festival Festival starts with an interactive prompt $ (SayText
 Barak> "Please say something") And it does.  $ (quit)

 Barak> 11. Going for espeakf.  $ cvs -d
 Barak> :pserver:anonymous@xxxxxxxxxxx:/cvsroot/espeakf
 Barak> login $ (pressing Enter as password) $ cvs -d
 Barak> :pserver:anonymous@xxxxxxxxxxx:/cvsroot/espeakf
 Barak> co espeakf The README says that copying the .pl file is
 Barak> sufficient, but since we have as Makefile with an "install:"
 Barak> rule, why wouldn't we just type: $ make install Wait, not so
 Barak> fast. the line saying "DESTDIR=" should be changed into
 Barak> something more meaninguful, something like: "DESTDIR=
 Barak> /usr/local/bin" $ make install That was stupid, should have
 Barak> read the Makefile more carefully.  Undo changing DESTDIR.

 Barak> The README also says that I should do: $ export DTK_TCL=perl $
 Barak> export DTK_PROGRAM=espeakf.pl I wonder what will happen if
 Barak> I'll type $ emacspeak (instead of running a customized script)

 Barak> Ok, Emacs is up and I face the same problem that I had on
 Barak> SuSE: It will only say special characters '?' (question mark)
 Barak> and '#' (pound).  Wonder if I should debug it and improve my
 Barak> perl skills or should I just switch to another distribution
 Barak> (Debian?) and see what's going on there.  Avoiding this
 Barak> problem won't make it go away, but I'll probably just dismiss
 Barak> it for awhile.


 Barak> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Barak> To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address
 Barak> on the emacspeak list send mail to
 Barak> "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a subject of
 Barak> "unsubscribe" or "help"


-- 
Tim Cross
Senior Analyst/Programmer
Applications Group - Information Technology
University of New England
 Phone: +61 2 6773 3210
   Fax: +61 2 6773 3424
E-Mail: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
   Web: http://www.une.edu.au/itd/systems/systems.html
---
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, 
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. 
We cause accidents."                             -Nathaniel Borenstein


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help"