I posted a message similar to this on the Debian Usenet news group so those who read that will already have seen most of this message. Do any of the present CDROM Debian installations have a feature that enables redirection of the console to a serial port during installation? FreeBSD installations do have a very useful feature in which one types boot -h on the local keyboard just after the boot begins and the system goes serial at that time. Do any of the newest installation CDROM's for Debian Linux have anything like this? If you wonder how I did it before, I had a bunch of floppies and the rescue floppy had a modified syslinux.cfg file which did activate ttyS0. That installation floppy calls for files that don't exist in the same version on the CDROM. So close and yet so far. I have also used the Realweasle card with the CDROM on one system, but the new system I am trying to install doesn't send anything to the Realweasle card. I will cheerfully buy or download and burn a new boot CD if I can get the startup process in to one nice package that doesn't seem to fight every step of the way. The CDROM I was using is obsolete, but I was going to install the old Linux and then use it to upgrade over the network. Martin McCormick