It started as a simple install of KALARM.

As I configured kalarm, I found that it would speak the displayed alarm message... Well, that aint happened yet.

First it requires kttsd and festival. That's ok, but synaptic failed to install espeak or festival (only libespeak1 and -data were installed).

I installed espeak and festival using synaptic but no joy. Still no text to speech in kalarm.

I can get espeak to speak from terminal. I even got a dummy voice from kttsmgr that directed me to the log file which shows festival not loading (I think).

Here is the pertinent part of the log file at ~/.speech-dispatcher/log (I hope it's pertinent)

		
	
Code:
Espeak: Initialized successfully.
---------------

[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 187364] speechd:  Initializing output module festival with binary /usr/lib/speech-dispatcher-modules/sd_festival and configuration /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules//festival.conf
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 187375] speechd:  Output module is logging to file /home/dan/.speech-dispatcher/log//festival.log
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 187754] speechd:  Module festival loaded.
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 191818] speechd:  Error: Broken pipe to module.
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 191843] speechd:   Output module working status: 0 (pid:6253)
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 191862] speechd:  Output module terminated abnormally, probably crashed.
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 191872] speechd: ERROR: Can't initialize audio in output module, see reason above.
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 191892] speechd:   Couldn't load specified output module
[Sat May 14 14:35:56 2011 : 191969] speechd:  Initializing output module flite with binary