speakup with debian squeeze

[Jude DaShiell]

I got a message from a friend telling me the latest version of debian 
squeeze doesn't appear to be configured for speech with respect to the 
bash shell.  Background for all of this is a sound card will be used for 
speech.  The friend wants speakup to come up first and does not want gnome 
with orca to start up unless he gives specific commands to start up the 
graphical user interface and orca after he has logged in with speakup.  
I'd like to know if it's possible to configure debian in this way too 
since when I next do a debian install I plan to do my system this way too.