Josh, will try to answer some of your other questions
"Once I can get this grml linux installed to the hard drive, can I? 1. remove the x-windows graphical environments because I don't need them."
Yes you can but you may need X if you want a spreadsheet and word processor. These can be installed with # aptitude install gnumeric abiword which is lighter on resources or with # aptitude install openoffice.org which is a 'near drop-in replacement for microsoft office'
"2. remove all applications I don't need."
Absolutely # aptitude remove application-name or # aptitude purge application-name which additionally tries to remove all configuration files.
"3. install voxin for use with speakup or brltty."
Don't know. Try # aptitude update && aptitude search voxin
"4. set up my wireless USB adapter so I can have internet access in grml command-line?"
Very likely yes. Plugin your usb adapter before you boot grml and see if it just works. grml comes with the drivers for a number of popular wireless chipsets. Some require firmware to be installed from outside of the Debian system. (grml is a flavour of debian)
"5. if I want x-windows gui, can I install gnome desktop with orca and use that? ubuntu doesn't want to work on here, so maybe gnome then will work with grml1.1?"
Absolutely. Do # aptitude search orca to find the proper name of the package. Then do # aptitude install gnome-orca Or whatever came back from the search
"6. once I got it all customized, including having automatic speech at startup, could I use some grml text-based software could to make my own custom linux live-cd/install cd? "
Absolutely. There is a grml script to do this. Try # man grml-scripts ========================
And again, Josh you asked:
" ok, so now I have a question. can someone tell me, keeping in mind that I have never used linux before in my whole entire life, I am a complete newby to grml and commandline linux. But if I am going to be a network administrator I will need to learn some kind of Linux distribution, what matters is that it has a Linux kernel which of course, grml has it because it's Linux... so, can someone give me an introduction to it? "
Google the linux cookbook 2nd edition by Michael Stutz for a good intro. The pdf is $40 from O'Reilly. It is in google.books.com for a preview. The recipes allow you to do something with the machine. Therefore you get feedback and satisfaction when you do something right. Learning theory and details then means something to your own experience of using linux. Every one says to read the man pages. But they are very hard indeed for a beginner. The cookbook is much better.
Best Wishes Moss
PS Additional to my previous post about partitioning and duel booting, it is good careful practice for a budding sysadmin to back up the entire windows installation before even beginning. See the documentation on partimagae to do this from the live CD.