Gnome from the sources questions.

[David Csercsics <aarg shaw ca>]

So I messed around a bit with this Ubuntu live CD but I can't really
play with it as much as I'hd like so I think I'd like to install the
gnome stuff on the distribution on my laptop. It is currently one that
I rolled my own from the sources because I couldn't get a distro to
install without sighted help on a laptop with no serial port so that
I ended up booting the GRML CD with software speech and then building
a distro from that. I have Xorg 7.1 built and it seems to start X so
this is working. I am not sure what dependencies gnome has other than
X or what is the best way to proceed from here. You can send mail off
list if you think this could get overly verbose and/or technical. I have
never configured X or gnome before but I read the manpages for xorg and
just ran xorgconfig and told it to use my framebuffer driver since this
is already working in console  mode. I need to know what to install so
that I can have a fully working desktop as well as which is the best
speech to use for gnome since Festival seems a bit sluggish even on a
modern laptop. I have Espeak working with Speakup for console access
but I don't think gnome speech will work with that. I realize this is
a bit of a long post but I'm not exactly sure where to read or what I
should be looking for and a lot of the traffic on here says use <insert
distro of choice here> because it's prepackaged. I like to learn things
from source so that I know how things fit themselves together so I can
test/break stuff and actually do something useful. I'm sure there are
lots of docs I'm just not sure which ones I should read exactly. But
the goal is to have a talking desktop when I start X. Is it better to
use a graphical login or can I start X after I'm logged in? Yes. I'm
mostly clueless about this stuff I know. Anything useful you could tell
me would be great though. Once I have this working on the laptop I will
try to set things up on the pure 64 bit box I'm working on right now and
see if I can figure out where it's breaking but I want to know how this
stuff is supposed to work before I start debugging and doing things that
will break stuff. And I'm not afraid to build hundreds of packages from
sources or get things from CVS if required. I'm just looking for the
recommended way of doing things. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute
to this work and make things better for others at some point.