Starting with my DOS days 20 years ago, up to the present, I have always had a floppy that I could use to boot or escue the computer, a floppy that talks to me, and accesses the drives, so I could fix things up as necessary. The floppy also included some repair programs such as checkdisk (dos), or fsck (Linux). All this holds true today, but now there is something new. If you check my intro web page, http://eklhad.hispeed.com/linux/jupiter/ you will find a couple of disk images. If you write these out to floppies, you can boot with the first, then load the initial ramdisk from the second. This brings up my speech adapter, and enough tools to view and modify dos, windows, and Linux files. You can also repair Linux file systems, repartition the disk, run lilo, create new file systems, unpack tarballs, reload utilities from your installation cd, and if your Linux system isn't too badly trashed, you can chroot into that partition and do almost anything from in there. But what if it is trashed, or you don't have a working Linux system yet? I've recently added a third disk image, with yet more programs and utilities. They just wouldn't fit on the first two floppies. You import this third floppy by typing "disk3". This provides enough machinery to access the internet, without using anything from the hard drive. I can run ftp, telnet, rlogin, and lynx. It's crude, but I can even use telnet to read and send mail, using the pop3 and smtp protocols. I can also download anything I need off the internet to repair or rebuild my system. all this won't work for you unless you're somewhat lucky. 1. You must have a synthesizer that I support. The generic setting actually works pretty well for most external synths. 2. You have to have some idea how to use Jupiter; it's quite different from a screen reader, though it does have a screen review mode. 3. You need a 3com, ne2000, or tulip compatible ethernet card. 4. You need a hard connection, such as a cable modem. There wasn't room for ppp dial up software. 5. You need to know your ip address and gateway address. 6. You need at least 32MB of ram. More instructions are available at my aforementioned web site. Now here's the interesting thing. If a newby can get his computer up using these three floppies, and if the internet connection actually works, and if he issues the proper command, I can log into his box and help him fix the problem, or get Jupiter running, or whatever he is trying to do. This isn't a security risk. He has to type a special command, which lets me in once, and only once, and nobody gets in after that, unless he types the command again. I jusst tested it out on my wife's machine. I logged in and had access to the entire machine. I think it's a pretty neat approach, especially for the Linux newby, without sight, who is absolutely overwhelmed by all of this. I can go in and do some of the hard work, e.g. kernels and lilo etc, and he can concentrate on learning the applications and the adapter. That's enough of a learning curve right there. Others may wish to use this three floppy system, with or without Jupiter. For instance, you could replace the Jupiter kernel with a speakup kernel in floppy number one, and everything else should fly. It doesn't seem to matter what version of kernel you use. 2.2.16, 2.4.4, whatever. Of course it must be configured for networking, with the ethernet drivers built in, not as modules. More work is required for process level adapters such as Emacsspeak and brltty. This is because the programs and shared libraries on my floppies are taken from an earlier Redhat distribution. You couldn't fit a hello world program from Redhat 7.0 or above on one floppy, because the shared libraries themselves are already larger than 4 meg, and when compressed, they just don't fit on a floppy. I mean you just can't do anything. So you'd have to recompile your adapter on an older system that uses the same shared libraries as my three floppies. Or - you might try to link your adapter statically, so it wouldn't draw upon the shared libraries, but this might still create a surprisingly large executable. Worse still, I have found some programs that don't seem to need a shared library until they are running. ldd doesn't give you a clue. And the program even starts up and seems to work, until it needs one of these libraries, then it better be there, or it just doesn't run properly. I found this out when I tried to get ftp to work. It needs libnss_files.so, but you sure don't get any indication of this - except that the program doesn't work properly when it tries to establish standard ports for standard services. I'm afraid a statically linked program might have the same problem. I just don't know. The best way is to rebuild any desired programs in the same environment that built your rescue floppies, whatever that may be. I'd better keep this old redhat distribution around - I don't think I could replace it if it were lost, and I sure can't maintain my rescue floppies without it. Sorry for the length of this message. It's a complex and important topic. Karl eklhad@home.com