Tony,
I have some good news on TTS with Read Etexts. It turns out that
speech-dispatcher is available through yum update, and it does work on
the XO. If you follow the instructions at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Using_Text_to_Speech you should be
able to get Read Etexts to do TTS
Tony,
Last night I was able to do a yum install of speech-dispatcher and
speech-dispatcher-python in Fedora 10, so there is a good chance that
the same thing would work on the XO. I have not tried it. The install
will bring in festival-lite, at about 7 megabytes, which you shouldn't
need
Tony,
Read Etexts does *not* have speech disabled. If you install
speech-dispatcher and configure it to use espeak (NOT espeak-generic)
then it will work. What happens in my code is I try to import
speech-dispatcher python and if I don't find it then I hide the Speech
tab on the toolbar.