I would suggest re-building gnome-speech from source if you are planning on using anything besides Festival. One of the quirks of the Gnome-speech library is that it builds speech support for what is installed on the target system. It will always build Festival support, but won't build support for anything else unless it's actually on the system, presumably because it links with it. If you can get Festival working, you won't need to re-build. Otherwise, you can get the source and build scripts from the Slackware site and use the script to build it, or hand-build it if you need to pass special options to it. You shouldn't need to mess with Gnopernicus itself. I've only played with it briefly, and it seems to work somewhat, but it's still pretty early in its development. I hope that one of the things which will be addressed is the capability to select speech synthesizers at runtime rather than compiling the library every time you need to add a new synthesizer.
