Hi. While I think Mandrake is a great distro it's not the most accessible one, and getting it working with speakup, yasr, or anything is allot of work. So at this point I would cross it off your list of distros to work with. I am not a big fan of Slackware, but it is perhaps about the most accessible distro you will find as far as installation, setup, and getting your feet wet with Linux. However, it's downside is if you like lots of configuration tools which can turn services on and off, configure sound, printer, etc, it may not be the best choice, and it also doesn't use sysv, but is more like BSD. If you don't mind manually setting up everything Slackware might be the better choice, but if you like all sorts of tools that handhold you Red Hat may be better in your case. Red Hat 8.0 does have a talking installer using speakup, but it isn't as easy as slack to install, but once it is on I think it is worth it. Red Hat has all sorts of nice features such as the service command which can start and stop services instantly. It has the chkconfig tool to configure what services you want to load, and what levels specifically you want to run in, and which you don't. Being that Red Hat is perhaps the most popular Linux on the market today you are likely to find just about any package you want compiled for it, and indeed allot of development is done in distros like Red Hat and then ported to compile on others. Red Hat is also on the bleeding edge and is usually first to get a new version of something like gnome, a library, compiler, etc... They release distros often enough so that you can keep up to date with the latest updates, etc.. If you end up working with business running Linux most of them request Red Hat or already have it on their systems, and while a Linux user could work on that box they wouldn't be as experienced in interacting with it as well as they would do if they knew it from using it personally. Anyway, that is my reasons for using RH. However, if accessibility is your number 1 concern then perhaps Slackware at this point is the best.
