Got Ubuntu installed, but--

[Buddy Brannan]

Hi y'all,

OK! I got it installed (Yay!) It took some doing, though, and thank
goodness for Speakup. I ended up having to do something like this:

Boot (I don't know if it booted with or without accessibility support
the final time, but no matter, cause Orca wasn't coming up on its own
anyway)
Start Orca
Open the terminal, sudo su, then kill Orca
Start Orca again
Get the non-responsive Orca, so--
Alt-tab back to the terminal, type fg, then ctrl-c
In another console, start up Speakup and kill off all the stuff that
makes Orca go
Go back to the gnome-terminal and restart Orca (which starts)
Then run ubiquity...

...but I had to do this a couple times, because the partitioner was
having an issue with my hard drive, which I finally solved by just
wiping the partition table completely with fdisk. 

I got installed, but the city/timezone selection dialog didn't really
work for me. Good thing it automatically assumed I was
Americal/New_York. I was able to get past it with Orca's flat review
keys. 

OK, so now I have a nice, shiny new Ubuntu running on a slow
Celeron/800 with 512MB RAM (well, 504 after the 8MB of shared video
memory). And goodness me is gnome ever slow. I think I'd like to
change to using the Cepstral voices I have, but I don't dare at this
point. Anything I can do to make it a little less painful? Is there a
more better window manager for instance, or should I just go for a
more better computer? 

But since I'm asking about Cepstral (well, I wasn't, but I did bring
it up), in order to use it, do I need to build gnome-speech from
source? I mean--I eventually plan on playing with mozilla3 and
Openoffice, but not on this machine for heaven's sake. 

And any ideas (while I'm here) on getting speakup to load earlier (I
just stuck it in /etc/modules, which is OK really) 

Apart from running really slow, which is at least 75% my fault for
having a computersaurus, this looks pretty promising. 

-- 
Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV
Email: buddy at brannan.name or phone 888-75-BUDDY
Get a free online mall and earn on 1000 stores:
http://www.powermall.us