Questions about orca and speakup

[Michael Whapples <mikster4@msn.com>]

Hello,
I have been trying to get orca, but with very little success, garnome didn't 
seem to want to compile everything successfully on my slackware machine (it 
seemed to fail when compiling HAL). Then when searching around about orca 
and other systems, I noticed that FreeBSD had it in ports, and being 
interested in what FreeBSD is liike (and also having a blank partition on my 
computer where a dead version of windows used to reside), I decided to try 
FreeBSD (requiring working through a serial console to get it setup). It 
seemed to be going OK, util network was to be connected to get internet 
access, where up on the kernel seems to have a problem and the machine gets 
restarted. Then hearing more good reports of Ubuntu from someone nearby, I 
decided to try that out, success finally, the CD booted and orca started 
speaking fine. Now orca, from what I can tell on the ubuntu CD will solve 
some of those difficulties of Linux that requires me to keep at least one 
computer with a copy of windows (mainly the browser not supported issues and 
javascript things).

Now for the actual questions. Would it be worth trying to persue installing 
gnome and orca in slackware, or would it be simpler to move over to ubuntu 
and having to move all configuration? Remember that both could co-exist for 
some time as I have that blank partition. Also if I was to move to ubuntu, 
is there a speakup package, or would it require a custom kernel? Also is 
there anything I should know about having both orca and speakup on a system, 
e.g. changing speakup to no synth before starting orca?

From
Michael Whapples