espeak fails with "could not open /dev/dsp"

[Michael Nagel]

Binary package hint: espeak

yesterday i tested espeak and it worked fine, but today i get the following error:

nailor@nailworks:~° espeak foo [1029]
PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY
PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000
PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY
PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000
PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY
PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: espeak 1.39-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/zsh
 LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
SourcePackage: espeak
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic i686

[Jonathan Duddington (jonsd)]

Yes. eSpeak in Ubuntu 8.10 is built to output sound using the OSS sound interface. OSS does not support sound mixing, so you will get this error if some other software is using Sound (or has recently used Sound and has not yet released the /dev/dsp).

eSpeak can be built either to use OSS or to use ALSA which supports sound mixing, depending on which version of the "PortAudio" sound interface library is used.

In Ubuntu 9.04, eSpeak has been built to use ALSA, so this problem should not occur.

You can also avoid this problem by piping its output through an ausio player such as "aplay", eg:

espeak -f textfile --stdout | aplay