Can gentle depend on a Kaldi installed previously elsewhere?

[nmstoker]

I'm trying to run gentle on Arch Linux and I initially didn't realise that your installation process tried to install Kaldi too, so I went ahead with getting it from the Arch repos. That installed in /opt/kaldi/ (which went okay and appears to work fine, as I've run a few of the examples)

What I'd like to know is whether it's possible to use that version of Kaldi (previously installed) or do I absolutely need to use the version within the sub-folder within gentle?

It strikes me that I'd be better off with the repo installed one (since it deals with various things specific to my OS) but if gentle has some assumptions that it'll be the sub-folder version or some particular dependency then I guess the repo wouldn't be the way to go.

I got onto this line of investigation as I was able to run serve.py but it gave me this:
Unhandled error in Deferred:

followed by nothing. I do definitely have ffmpeg installed. I have (I believe) done the Arch equivalent of the other installation steps, it's just the Kaldi part I'm thinking is a problem currently.

Thanks!

[dariusk]

I'm also having this problem on MacOS El Capitan. Unhandled error in Deferred: followed by nothing...

EDIT: I also tried on a clean Ubuntu 18.04 LTS install. Same issue.

[gregsadetsky]

@nmstoker @dariusk out of curiosity, have either you been able to locate the issue and use a previously installed instance of Kaldi? Thanks!

[nmstoker]

I ended up using the version that it tried to install, however as the install.sh and install_deps.sh scripts assume Ubuntu, I ended up doing the various component steps manually.

I'm not in front of that computer and won't have time in next week or so, but if useful later I could probably go back and confirm steps from my history.

It seems to work reasonably well (I do get occasional hangs where it gets stuck and more rarely the server outright crashes). It doesn't seem to happen at the same point consistently and I've not been able to diagnose the cause, but all in all I'm really pleased with getting it working. It would still seem preferable to use the packaged Kaldi though.

[gregsadetsky]

Glad to hear, thank you! My Kaldi compilation is still failing (this is on a fresh Ubuntu 18 install) and I'm unsure of the step at which it goes wrong. If you could find some info from your install/history, that'd be great. Thanks!

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Update: I was able to compile gentle by installing a few things beforehand. I've documented it here.