Hi John and all. The reason why i haven't installed with speakup yet is that there are some problems with the devian woody speakup cds and/or the base floppies for debian woody. I was using floppies because I can't hook upto the internet yet. However, I did get as far as partitioning my hard drive and have a DOS partition in addition to linux, so I was able to install dOS with asap. I may be able to install debian from my hard drive if woody still has a base package. I can't connect my computers together yet, but I probably could put the debian tgz file or whatever on cdrom and copy it to my laptop hard drive. I can't use the floppy and the cdrom on the hard drive at the same time because they are interchangeable in the ultrabay and i don't have a cable to connect the floppyexternally, as I understand may be possible. You see, there are lots of issues here and things get complicated. but I think you are right; I think I can probably compile brltty on the thinkp d once i have linux installed and it should be fine. Cheryl