Hi, Glenn. The reason you got no speech during startup is you failed to add the speakup line speakup_synth=ltlk to your boot loader commands during the Red Hat installation. This is not necessary on new versions of speakup and Red Hat/Fedora, but was necessary on 8.0 which I guess that information was dropped from the howto since no one else is using 8.0. There was a dialog that asked you to pass any special commands to the boot loader and you failed to tell your loader to load speakup. The reason the "modprobe speakup_ltlk" line isn't working is that this only works on modern versions of speakup. The version of speakup that came with Red Hat 8.0 is very old, and to get it working you'll need to add the line: speakup_synth=ltlk to the kernel append line of the boot loader's conf file. If you accepted the default boot loader grub the file is /boot/grub/grub.conf. Hth.
