eSpeak Problem: PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi,
My audio problems with Ubuntu under VmWare Server continue. As I've been 
unable to find a workaround for the audio issues I'm having with Festival, 
I'm considering using the eSpeak package in stead. I saw a speech dispatcher 
config file for it at:

http://braille.uwo.ca/pipermail/speakup/2006-April/038667.html

eSPeak itself, including the binary, can be downloaded at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/espeak

So I fetched speak-1.14-linux.zip on the Web site and unzipped it directly 
in my home folder. UPon running it, however, I get the following error:

vtatila at Sandbox:~$ ./speak "this is a test"
PaHost_OpenStream: could not open /dev/dsp for O_WRONLY
PaHost_OpenStream: ERROR - result = -10000

Apparently it cannot access the sound card for some reason. This is a 
separate termminal via which I logged in. I also have a Gnome session 
running and had disabled audio in it as someone adviced it might help with 
Gnopernicus problems. I re-enabled the Gnome sound effects and tried again 
with no changes. I've testedd and Gnome happily plays its own sound effects 
like it should.

PA is short for port audio I guess but other than that the message isn't 
very informative. I googled with the whole message but only found this 
question, to which no-one had answered:

http://techweb.rfa.org/pipermail/portaudio/2005-December/005067.html

I continued by googling with the constant O_WRONGLY alone but found nothing 
of interest. Apparently it is some Unix standard library constant and that's 
that.

So any help appreciated.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/