You can't just pull the kernel off the cd and use it, it doesn't work that way. You need to build your own kernel to use. We have a tool called genkernel that from how I understand it builds a kernel with everything you could possibley want into the kernel but it currently doesn't support speakup in it's base config. Genkernel just got a new maintainer recently, so speakup will be one of the next things it does include. I think that I need to stress something again for some of you. Gentoo's accessibility project is farely new. Meaning I've only been doing this for 3 months at the most, maybe not even that. I have a great developer team of which John Hood is one, but we've still got a lot to do. If you guys have more questions, you can subscribe to the gentoo-accessibility mailing list 'gentoo-accessibility-subscribe at lists.gentoo.org' Or come talk to me on irc.freenode.net in #gentoo-accessibility . Thanks -- Gentoo Linux: dmwaters at gentoo.org http://www.gentoo.org