Distributions with speakup modified kernels?

[Darragh]

Hello,
Ok, I've installed and messed around with Fedora but I'm sick of people, a
certain person in this country telling me that its not stable, there are
still bugs, its still an alfa bla bla bla.

My question:
I'm being advised to go for another distribution.  Red hat 9 was suggested.
If I do indeed go for another distribution what would you suggest?  I will
mainly use speakup and if I can ever get it to work, emacspeak however, I'd
like to mess around with gnome and gnopernicus.

I've just spent the last three hours trying to figure out why Winblows xp
stopped recognising the NTFS partition on this disk when I should have being
working on stuff for deadlines due tomorrow.

I'd really appreciate any views you have about any distribution of Linux
that you've used successfully with speakup.
The distros that were suggested are:
mandrake,
slackware,
red hat
suSE
and
Free BSD.

please please let me know.


Darragh