Intro and gnopernicus question

["Willem van der Walt<willem top health gov za>" <willem top health gov za>]

Hello,
I am a blind Linux user for a number of years.
Up to now, I am accessing linux through telnet from a dos box with a text-
only screen reader.
I decided to try gnopernicus and ran into problems.
Running a rh9 box, I installed all the packages required for gnopernicus.
The README file in the 0.3.4 tarball refers to a autogen.sh script that i
cannot find, but there was a configure script.
I successfuly ran ./configure, make and make install.
I ran the festival --server and it started up.
I then signed on blindly from the console of the linux box and ran
startx as a normal user.
As the same user from a telnet session, I set DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0 and
ran gnopernicus --enable-sound
I heard Welcome to gnopernicus spoken very fast by festival.
According to my wife, the gnopernicus is started and she could move 
arround the
options, but we could get no further speech from the thing.
In the telnet session it said some thing about idle callback which i did
not understand.
What am i doing wrong?
tia
Willem