How To Install emacspeak on Debian 9

In this tutorial we learn how to install emacspeak on Debian 9. emacspeak is speech output interface to Emacs

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install emacspeak on Debian 9.

What is emacspeak

emacspeak is:

Emacspeak is a speech output system that will allow someone who cannot see to work directly on a UNIX system.

Emacspeak is built on top of Emacs. Once Emacs is started with Emacspeak loaded, users get spoken feedback for all actions. As Emacs can do everything, they get speech feedback for everything they do.

This package recommends the speech server for the espeak (software) speech synthesizer, so it should work straight away. However it also contains the source for speech servers to support the DECtalk Express and DECtalk MultiVoice (hardware) speech synthesizers. For other synthesizers, look for speech server packages such as emacspeak-ss and eflite.

There are three methods to install emacspeak on Debian 9. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install emacspeak Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install emacspeak using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install emacspeak

Install emacspeak Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install emacspeak using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install emacspeak

Install emacspeak Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install emacspeak using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install emacspeak

How To Uninstall emacspeak on Debian 9

To uninstall only the emacspeak package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove emacspeak

Uninstall emacspeak And Its Dependencies

To uninstall emacspeak and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 9, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove emacspeak

Remove emacspeak Configurations and Data

To remove emacspeak configuration and data from Debian 9 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge emacspeak

Remove emacspeak configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove emacspeak configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge emacspeak

Dependencies

emacspeak have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install emacspeak package on Debian 9 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.