I run Arch here, and I love it. It starts out in the command line environment, and you can add only what you want to it, including full GNOME if you want. The Pacman packaging system is quite powerful, and few packages actually need to be built from source manually. Documentation is also very extensive and kept up-to-date for the most part. I highly recommend Arch for anyone who has some command line knowledge to get started and wants to maintain a mostly stable but also up-to-date system. As for speech, I am not aware of any hardware speech that works with Orca, the GNOME screen reader. You can use eSpeak, eSpeak with Mbrola voices, Flite (only the Kal voice I believe), and there are a couple of ways to get Pico (the Android 2.3 voice) working. I can't recommend the synthesizer you know by the name Eloquence, as it goes by many other names and appears to be licensed and relicensed, sold and resold by many different companies, but no one seems to have the source code to fix all the terrible bugs, e.g. crashes on common typos, etc, and no one can rebuild it to be compatible with the current C libraries and such. Therefore, there is no 64-bit version of it, and it requires C libraries that are over 10 years old, which can introduce many security and stability issues into your new system. There are, however, other non-free speech synthesizers you can purchase if you don't like any of the free software options, most of which are kept updated and are compatible with more modern systems, but someone else may need to fill you in about those, because I only keep up with the free/open source voices. Hope this helps. ~Kyle http://kyle.tk/ -- "Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?" Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"
