5. Installing Emacspeak

Assuming that you have all the items listed in, Requirements, you are ready to install Emacspeak. The following steps provide the instructions to do so.

1. Go to the Emacspeak site at http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net and, from the Support and Documentation section, select an Emacspeak file to download. If you select the binary file, emacspeak.tar.gz, you will need to configure and make Emacspeak. If you have some experience with Linux, or if you're using a distribution that does not support RPMs, you should download this option. If your distro supports RPMs, you can download the ready-to-install version of Emacspeak (emacspeak-14.0-1.noarch.rpm).

2. Download the file and place it in your home directory.

3. Type su root and provide the root password if you are not already logged onto your machine as root. You'll need root permissions to install Emacspeak.

4. If you downloaded the rpm version of Emacspeak, unpack it using the command rpm -i emacspeak-14.0-1.noarch.rpm. If you downloaded the binary version, unzip and untar the file, then follow the installation directions in the README file in the resulting emacspeak-14.0 directory.

   Once you have installed the rpm, you'll see a message saying that Emacspeak installed successfully, as well as some additional instructions.

5. If you are using Emacspeak v.14 or earlier and also using ViaVoice TTS as your synthesizer, change directories to the /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacspeak/servers/linux-outloud directory and type the command make. This command compiles the ViaVoice TTS server. If you are not using ViaVoice, or if you have Emacspeak v.15 or later, you do not need to complete this step.

6. Using the cd command, change directories to the /etc directory and open your profile file with your favorite text editor (you must be root to edit the profile). Scroll to the bottom of the file, then add the following two lines:

   export DTK_PROGRAM DTK_PROGRAM=name of your speech server

   The value of DTK_PROGRAM must be the name of your speech server. A list of standard Emacspeak-supported speech synthesizers and the names of their respective speech servers is below.

   ViaVoice TTS	Outloud
   DecTalk Xpress	dtk-exp
   DecTalk MultiVoice	dtk-mv

   Several additional synthesizers are supported, but they require add-on speech servers. Refer to the documentation for each specific speech server for more information.

7. Save your profile file and close it.

Now, you should have installed and configured everything required to run Emacspeak. To use Emacspeak, log on to your system as someone other than root (you should never run Emacspeak as root), and type emacspeak at the prompt. Emacspeak should start talking immediately.