Other Ubuntu GNU/Linux tips

When trying to use the festival speech synthesizer under Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), for instance in the following way:

$ echo "Hello, mommy!" festival —tts

you will receive the following error:

Linux: can't open /dev/dsp

This is because esd is grabbing the soundcard. To remedy, use esddsp to launch festival:

$ echo "Hello, mommy!" esddsp festival —tts

This way festival will synthesize the speech.