hardware or software synths

[Kyle]

I would personally recommend using Speakup with software speech. Most distributions with Speakup now come up talking using eSpeakup, which pipes the text to be spoken to eSpeak. My only other recommendation, especially if you will be using multiple machines with varying configurations, would be to carry a USB headset or other sound device that you can trust to work with Linux. For some strange reason, some onboard sound still comes up muted, so it's best to have something that you can be sure will always play sound unmuted out of the box. Hope this helps.
~Kyle
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