What I found in my tests is that Festival would compile just fine provided you didn't enable shared libraries. The documentation states that shared libraries should work just fine in Linux, but it bombed out in Slackware 9.0 with the default of static libraries, it took awhile to build, but was able to run just fine. Personally, I find the Festival voices very flat and difficult to listen to for long periods. Festival was also somewhat flaky in Gnopernicus for me due to its not supporting indexing. I haven't messed with Flite since it isn't yet supported by Gnopernicus. Freetts uses the same speech as Festival, but since it's Java-based, you really need a fast computer to make it practical.
