Building (Open) AstroMenace on Debian

To start, download the sources from http://sourceforge.net/projects/openastromenace/, install the required dependencies (ReadMe.txt will tell you, or you can try just building it and see what it complains about missing), and build (cd build; cmake ..; make;).

While trying to build (Open) AstroMenace on Debian I encountered the following error:


OpenAstroMenaceSVN/AstroMenaceSource/Core/RendererInterface/OGL_Draw3D.cpp:38: error: ‘PFNGLCLIENTACTIVETEXTUREPROC’ does not name a type

Googling only turned up this, which was exactly the problem I encountered, but offered no solution.  I figured out it was missing a definition from some OpenGL header.  So I traced back the includes, and found the following text in OpenAstroMenaceSVN/AstroMenaceSource/Core/Base.h

#ifdef WIN32

        ...

#endif

#if defined(__APPLE__) && defined(__MACH__)

       ...

#else

        #define __glext_h_  // Don't let gl.h include glext.h

        #include      // Header File For The OpenGL32 Library

        #include     // Header File For The GLu32 Library

        #undef __glext_h_

#endif

Now, it has the comment "Don't let gl.h include glext.h".  However, I don't see why not!  Because when I comment out the #define and #undef statements, it compiles fine!  It should look like:

#else

        //#define __glext_h_  // Don't let gl.h include glext.h

        #include      // Header File For The OpenGL32 Library

        #include     // Header File For The GLu32 Library

        //#undef __glext_h_

#endif

So then it compiled correctly, but still got a very strange error when linking:

Linking CXX executable AstroMenace

c++: `sdl-config: No such file or directory

make[2]: *** [AstroMenace] Error 1

make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/AstroMenace.dir/all] Error 2

make: *** [all] Error 2

It seems like some sort of quotation mismatch error.  I went through the CMake setup file, and it seemed fine. So instead, I just tried to manually link it myself.  I found the linker command it was trying to execute in CMakeFiles/AstroMenace.dir/link.txt, but I couldn't find anything wrong with it, so I copied the contents, put them into a terminal, and pressed enter. For some reason, this now worked!  For reference, this is what the file contained for me: http://pastebin.com/U8UifLAq

Once it built, I then went to download the necessary data files (under the vfs section of openastromenace downloads on sourceforge, download the data, and a language), and extracted their contents into the build directory.

Then run ./AstroMenace and .... well...it works for me at this point!

Creating a voice with Festvox for Festival in debian/linux

Okay, Debian provides packages for speech-tools, but they aren't complete.  On top of that, the latest package versions provided at festvox.org are of incompatible versions with eachother.  Instead of trying to figure that out, I suggest downloading the svn: http://developer.berlios.de/svn/?group_id=3272

All we care about are speech_tools and

./configure and make them both.

Then start following this tutorial:

http://festvox.org/bsv/x1003.html

However, there might be a few problems.  Recording audio is a little bit funky, as they use na_record, which doesn't support ALSA.  However, hopefully you have oss support enabled.  When you get to the point where you are going to execute bin/prompt_them you might want to modify it first.

the line 

$ESTDIR/bin/na_record -f 16000 -t $duration  wav/$f.wav

can be replaced with

$ESTDIR/bin/na_record -audiodevice /dev/dsp1 -f 16000 -time $duration  wav/$f.wav

if you want to send it to the oss device /dev/dsp1

Or, you can replace it with arecord (which uses ALSA) like so:

arecord -Dplughw:1 -r 16000 -d $duration  wav/$f.wav

(this will record from the ALSA device plughw:1).

You can also uncomment various features inside this file, such as waiting for you to press return before recording, or playing back your recording immediately after you record it.

I'll update this as I encounter more problems.