bluetooth query

[Kirk Reiser]

Hello folks: I received a couple of bluetooth devices for Xmas and am
just now getting around to looking at them. I was wondering what types
of experience people have had with getting bluetooth working with
speakup?

Specifically I am interested in working with ALSA without going
through pulse-audio but figured peoples experience with pulse would
also be interesting to those who use it.

Any stories or suggestions are welcome.

Kirk
--
Well that's it then, colour me secure!

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[Chris Brannon]

Post by Kirk Reiser
Specifically I am interested in working with ALSA without going
through pulse-audio but figured peoples experience with pulse would
also be interesting to those who use it.

I'm also interested if anyone has any experience with this. I managed
to get a bluetooth headset to pair with Linux, and then I used
bluez-alsa to drive it. I could play audio files with programs like
mpv, but getting it to work as the default audio device for everything,
including espeakup, seems a bit more problematic.

-- Chris

[Chris Brannon]

As far as I can tell, bluez-alsa is currently a dead-end for us.
Here are the two problems I see:

1. It does not do any kind of software mixing. You can only play one
audio stream at a time. dmix can't be used, because it requires a
hardware device, and bluez-alsa provides a virtual alsa device.
2. There's got to be a way for audio to fall back to another card when a
bluetooth headset loses its charge, goes out of range, etc. I don't
know how that could be made to work seamlessly.
I wouldn't want espeakup to become completely confused / nonfunctional
just because the BT headset became disconnected.

So I don't think bluetooth with alsa is a good fit for console speech.

-- Chris

[Chris Brannon]

Yes, you can run Speakup through a bluetooth headset. As I said earlier
in the thread, bluez-alsa is a dead-end. I finally had to make my peace
with pulseaudio over the last couple days. In order to use it with one
of the Speakup softsynth options, you must run pulse in system mode.
The pulse developers strongly discourage this. One of their biggest
reasons is security concerns in a multiuser setup. Frankly, I could
care less, because the machines in my house are just used by me or my
partner. It's not like we're in a corporate environment. Getting pulse
to run in system mode took a bit of work. Since it is so frowned upon,
the documentation for doing it is pretty minimal. And my distro didn't
seem to have many helpful resources. Tomorrow, when I'm thinking more
clearly, I'll try and document all of the steps I took to get it to
work.

So to all of the people (including me) who said that speakup / espeakup
don't play nicely together, that's only partially correct. If you're
willing to run in system mode and go against the recommendations of the
pulse people, they play quite nicely together indeed.

-- Chris

[Glenn At Home]

I will look forward to that, as I think that in some ways, Linux is more
secure than I need for personal use.
Glenn
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Brannon" <***@the-brannons.com>
To: <***@linux-speakup.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2017 6:09 PM
Subject: Re: bluetooth query


Yes, you can run Speakup through a bluetooth headset. As I said earlier
in the thread, bluez-alsa is a dead-end. I finally had to make my peace
with pulseaudio over the last couple days. In order to use it with one
of the Speakup softsynth options, you must run pulse in system mode.
The pulse developers strongly discourage this. One of their biggest
reasons is security concerns in a multiuser setup. Frankly, I could
care less, because the machines in my house are just used by me or my
partner. It's not like we're in a corporate environment. Getting pulse
to run in system mode took a bit of work. Since it is so frowned upon,
the documentation for doing it is pretty minimal. And my distro didn't
seem to have many helpful resources. Tomorrow, when I'm thinking more
clearly, I'll try and document all of the steps I took to get it to
work.

So to all of the people (including me) who said that speakup / espeakup
don't play nicely together, that's only partially correct. If you're
willing to run in system mode and go against the recommendations of the
pulse people, they play quite nicely together indeed.

-- Chris
_______________________________________________
Speakup mailing list
***@linux-speakup.org
http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

[Janina Sajka]

I'm all for security, but only within reason. I've yet to hear a
reasonable use case that explains why system wide pulseaudio is
insecure.

The only use case I've ever come across from the pulse people, and I
have pushed on this quite hard from time to time, says that you don't
want to enable someone to surreptitiously enable a colleague, or a
spouse's microphone. In other words, the pulse people don't want to be
associated with corporate or matrimonial spying.

So, those interested in spying of this type will have to continue to
focus on Alexa, or iphone, or Android, I suppose!

What a pile of <expletive deleted>.

Janina

Post by Chris Brannon
Yes, you can run Speakup through a bluetooth headset. As I said earlier
in the thread, bluez-alsa is a dead-end. I finally had to make my peace
with pulseaudio over the last couple days. In order to use it with one
of the Speakup softsynth options, you must run pulse in system mode.
The pulse developers strongly discourage this. One of their biggest
reasons is security concerns in a multiuser setup. Frankly, I could
care less, because the machines in my house are just used by me or my
partner. It's not like we're in a corporate environment. Getting pulse
to run in system mode took a bit of work. Since it is so frowned upon,
the documentation for doing it is pretty minimal. And my distro didn't
seem to have many helpful resources. Tomorrow, when I'm thinking more
clearly, I'll try and document all of the steps I took to get it to
work.
So to all of the people (including me) who said that speakup / espeakup
don't play nicely together, that's only partially correct. If you're
willing to run in system mode and go against the recommendations of the
pulse people, they play quite nicely together indeed.
-- Chris
_______________________________________________
Speakup mailing list
http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

--
Janina Sajka, Phone: [phone]
sip:***@asterisk.rednote.net
Email: ***@rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup: http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

[tony seth]

Yaaay! I do look fondly forward to that documentation. Thanks muchee! Cheereo!