Hi everyone.  I've just been testing the current Gentoo AMD64 live DVD 
available from

http://mirrors.sfo1.gni.com/Gentoo/ten/livedvd-amd64-10.0-20090909-0915.iso  and have no problems when booting into it with hardware speech.  I am, however, unable to get software speech to work, try as I might.  Typing 'gentoo speakup.synth=dectlk nox' makes my Dectalk USB set up like a Dectalk Express work every time.  When I type 'gentoo speakup.synth=soft nox' at the boot prompt, I get no speech at all.  I have not filed a bug about this, because it's very probably been resolved by someone on this list who knows much more about all this than I do!  Any advice about how to get software speech working when I boot this live DVD would be very much appreciated.  If you need any information about my computer system, please let me know.

Yours sincerely,

John Robinson