I added a serial line to the syslinux.cfg so I could see what was going on. The message I got was unable to find kernel image: vmlinuz and also I still haven't figured out for sure about the "dd", though I'm sure it is now needed for using two floppies. I did get debian installed finally and i also have gotten brltty to work on my debian installation so this wasn't a brltty or braillelite problem. The vanilla flavored woody installation disks still won't work for me on my laptop but will on my desktop, so I think that's a laptop/kernel issue rather than a brltty issue. I tried the woody install cds (rescue and root) on my laptop without any modification for brltty and they still didn't work there and worked on the desktop. so I have an email in to debian-laptop about that. Still think it might be fun to try Red hat sometime but at least I do have a system installed now. Cheryl