Need help installing any Linux distro

[Jerry Matheny]

I have a delemma: I have a Dell Latidude D600 laptop, and it doesn't have a dvd burner, so I'm unable to burn the new Speakup modified Fedora Core 8 dvd, and there's not any regular iso cd images available for it. And I'm not an experienced Linux user by any means. I have Slackware on my desktop, but I had help getting everything running, due to the Slackware 12 cd's and dvd being corrupted.

So, basically, I'm wondering if anyone might have any suggestions as a good distro that I could install, if not Fedora Core 8, that would allow me to install Speakup, get Alsa sound working without too much fuss, and then get spk-synth-connect working so I can use software speech with Speakup? I do have an external synthesizer I can use for the initial install, I just prefur Eloquence sounding speech. Oh, I also would like Gnome and Orca, that way I can get VMWare working on my laptop as well.

Sorry to throw all of this at you guys at once, but I'm kind of wondering what I should do. So any help I could get would be appreciated.


Thanks in advance,

Jerry