Questions about new Linux setups

[Kyle]

I run Arch here, and I love it. It starts out in the command line 
environment, and you can add only what you want to it, including full 
GNOME if you want. The Pacman packaging system is quite powerful, and 
few packages actually need to be built from source manually. 
Documentation is also very extensive and kept up-to-date for the most 
part. I highly recommend Arch for anyone who has some command line 
knowledge to get started and wants to maintain a mostly stable but also 
up-to-date system.

As for speech, I am not aware of any hardware speech that works with 
Orca, the GNOME screen reader. You can use eSpeak, eSpeak with Mbrola 
voices, Flite (only the Kal voice I believe), and there are a couple of 
ways to get Pico (the Android 2.3 voice) working. I can't recommend the 
synthesizer you know by the name Eloquence, as it goes by many other 
names and appears to be licensed and relicensed, sold and resold by many 
different companies, but no one seems to have the source code to fix all 
the terrible bugs, e.g. crashes on common typos, etc, and no one can 
rebuild it to be compatible with the current C libraries and such. 
Therefore, there is no 64-bit version of it, and it requires C libraries 
that are over 10 years old, which can introduce many security and 
stability issues into your new system. There are, however, other 
non-free speech synthesizers you can purchase if you don't like any of 
the free software options, most of which are kept updated and are 
compatible with more modern systems, but someone else may need to fill 
you in about those, because I only keep up with the free/open source 
voices. Hope this helps.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"