I was going to ask for help on this list, but I figured out what was wrong, myself, so I will tell all of you what happened. I use an old P.C. running MS-DOS and a screen reader as well as Kermit's terminal emulater as a serial terminal. What I was noticing was that if I started the installation from the CDROM with the command linux console=ttyS0,9600n8 everything worked right until I finished the part on the CDROM where one installs the base operating system and reboots. After rebooting, one discovers two important things. The good news is that Debian configured the TTY port to be a serial console all the time so the system talks after reboot. The bad news is that it forgets that it should be a vt100 terminal and starts spitting out all kinds of escape codes along with the configuration dialog. To make a long story short, you can fix that by putting the CDROM back in as if you were going to start from the beginning once more. Instead of doing that, go to the option that lets you start a shell. Mount your brand new base operating system partition on /mnt and then go to what should be /etc/inittab. In this case, it is /mnt/etc/inittab. Since the special shell you are in is designed to fit on a floppy disk, there isn't room for vi and you must run something called nano-tiny which is kind of like getting cut off at the knees. To be honest, I never figured it out well enough to edit inittab, but I did mount /dev/fd0 to another mount point and copy inittab to the floppy and then edit it on a working Linux system with vi. I then reversed the process and moved the floppy back to the new system and cp'd inittab back to /mnt/etc/inittab. What you do is to find the line that mentions your serial port and comment it out. Look a little further down and there is another line that mentions your serial port in the way it normally is set up. That line is also commented out so you need to uncomment it. Now, the system will know on the next boot that you are a vt100 again. Reboot and you will get a shell prompt. Don't let that scare you. just run /usr/bin/base-configure and you will be back where you left off before except that now the screen works right. My hat goes off to the original developers of Linux for some real forethought in making it possible to get a back door in to the configuration process in order to fix the terminal problem for situations like this. Nobody ever said that it had to be pretty or neat, but at least we can modify the situation to make it work for us. The other thing I learned is that the inittab file used for the configuration part of the installation process is not your regular inittab file. It gets used just long enough to effect the installation and then it is replaced with the proper inittab file. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group