Okay, that's what we ended up doing tonight with sighted assistance. The result was no speech. Other than speakup not being installed on my system I have a perfectly working linux system. For some reason although I heard everything during the install process, speakup did not install. We checked the whole hard drive using find and no reference was found to any kind of file or directory with speakup as part of its name. The timing is about 8 seconds after boot up to hit control-x on this system. Another way to state this is that after post, the system will try the floppy drive 4 times. If you hit control-x between the second and third try, you get text lilo. Also the only choice presently in it is linux. Actually we tried vmlinuz speakup_synth=ltlk tonight and speakup wasn't found. It's possible another member from the penguin club will come over tomorrow night so we can stack the deck in favor of linux before the next club meeting. Jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net>