We are Approaching the End of an Era...

Those words have been over used many times, but they are appropriate here.

For at least five years, the Festival text-to-speech system has been the voice of SPOCS.  Before Festival, there was an allophone-based system that I built myself.  The board still sits on the historical shelf.

The Famous Historical Shelf

The SPOCS speech board is the one at the bottom, with the green connector.  To its right are two rocket-powered vehicles a daughter built for a science project.  Above the speech synthesizer  is a genuine 40mb  (yes, 40 mega bytes!) hard drive.  On top of the drive is an honest-to-gosh jet engine.  It used to be my dads'.
Anyway, I loaded the latest version of Fedora (24) onto my Virtualbox virtual machine.  As I was going through the SPOCS setup, I noticed that Festival was not working.  In fact, Festival was crashing - and that NEVER happened before!  So...I went searching, and found what had happened.  Note especially comment #8!  Fedora is going to drop the Festival package in version 25. 
Now, I have no intention of going back to my allophone-based synthesizer.  Instead, I found a new hardware based solution.  I have one on order, and will install it on SPARCL14 when it gets here.  It is supposed to be a lot more expressive than festival, so we'll see.

Today we enjoyed a very warm, sunny day.  The weather people tell us the temperature is going to crash in the next day, and by Sunday we may have snow!  Well, it is November, after all.

Good night, Ma Wolfe, wherever you are.