I have been behind on reading Email this Summer, but I just read the discussion concerning FreeBSD. This is a little off-topic because FreeBSD isn't Linux, but it is open-source, free, and very robust. This last Summer, I installed FreeBSD-4.3 on four IBM Netfinity servers. It took me a bit to get the hang of the process, but it is extremely blind-friendly if your system has at least one serial port and that port functions as Com1. You also need a DOS P.C. with a suitable screen reader and telecomm package such as Kermit or Procomm and a null-modem cable. What happens is that the FreeBSD installation CDROM has a routine on it that, in some cases, will start talking through the serial port if you have it connected and no local keyboard connected to the FreeBSD system. If your system doesn't talk to you on boot-up like mine didn't, all is still not lost. An alternative method of getting your serial console to work is to connect a local keyboard to the stubborn FreeBSD system and boot the CDROM. You will hear two beeps. At that point, hit any key except Return on the local keyboard and type boot -h and voila, the FreeBSD copyright notice starts spewing out the serial port. You certainly need a VT100 emulator to do the installation and it takes a little getting used to, but it does work and I could do an OS installation complete with hard drive formatting in about 25 minutes, once I knew what I was doing. When the system comes up fully, your serial port goes silent unless it is defined as a TTY, so you need to be able to configure the network port and log in to it over Ethernet after the initial installation. Interestingly enough, the serial port wakes up again each time you reboot or halt the system. You can boot in to single-user mode and fix things if you have to. I really like it, but Linux seems to have better sound card support. FreeBSD is just another fine open-source choice we have. I think it has much better security by default than Linux does, but Linux can be quite secure if you take the time to make it that way. Anyway, I figured I would share my experiences with the rest of the list regarding FreeBSD. By the way, you can download an entire 650-meg ISO image of the installation disk and burn your own CDROM if you have a good network connection or lots of patience. We have a good network connection at Oklahoma State and one of the mirror sites for FreeBSD seems to also have a good connection, so it only took a relatively short time to do the download. The first site we tried took well over a day, but it really didn't matter as the download kept getting aborted due to loss of the connection. The image did produce a bootable disk and I was able to use it for the installations. I probably should amend what I said at the first. If you have a Windows P.C. and JAWS or any of the other Windows screen readers, that will also work fine to communicate with the FreeBSD system's serial port. Your Windows terminal program should emulate a VT100 and the Comm port needs to be 9600, N, 8 and 1 in order to work with the remote console built in to the FreeBSD installation disk. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group