Starting with Linux

[Tom and Esther Ward]

Hi, Karen.
Here is what I found based on my personal experience with speakup and Linux
distributions, and what I have tried over the past couple of years.
Of all the distributions Slackware was the easiest to patch speakup in to as
I could grab a generic 2.x kernel, get the speakup source, patch it,
configure the code, compile, and then install. It also was not dificult to
make a tgz package for the kernel in case you needed to reinstall the kernel
again.
However, it does lack some features that other distributions have with
modified kernels.
Red Hat/Fedora linux's modified kernels use to give me some trouble. While I
liked the distribution I would often use Bill's rpms to update rather than
do it myself as getting the kkernel to compile properly would get
frustrating for me at times. However, if you are just happy installing
bill's rpm of the kernel and then there isn't any real problem unless you
want to upgrade the kernel with speakup everytime something cool appears in
cvs.
As for Mandrake i like the distribution, but I am having serious troubles
getting speakup to compile using Mandrake's modified kernel source. The only
major advantage to using Mandrake's kernel source is that they have some
things like supermount support and a couple of other additions.
However, I have in the past compiled generic kernels on Mandrake and
installed them, and rewritten fstab to use mount rather than supermount.
However, other than installation of speakup it seams to operate the same and
work about the same on all of them I have tried.