Actually, the problem with the Slackware 8.0 Speakup kernel was that they compiled it for SMP support and the modules that get installed by default were for single-processor machines. You can either copy the SMP modules from the contrib CD over the existing ones, or rebuild your kernel without SMP support. If this is a new install, I don't understand why you'd use Slackware 8.0 over 8.1 unless that is all you have available.
