I came across this and thought it may be of interest to some of you

[mike]

Hi, I came across a accessible distro today called linuxspeaks. It is text based and still in early stages. However, it can be installed in ubuntu, which is why I am bringing it to your attention.
   The sight is www.joekamphaus.net.
   You have to run the installer as root, and after rebooting the command to run the program in terminal is mainmenu.
   I only briefly looked at the programs and basically it is a good front end to already reliable consul programs. Oh, be sure to stop Orca before typing mainmenu. 
Anyway, it sounds like this could be a nice thing to add to our ubuntu system. I haven't tried the e-mail program yet, but I will when I have some time.
Mike.