Hi Kirk and listers: Well, looks like at least two people with newer serial ports are having problems booting a speakup-enabled kernel. Both have their synths on com1 (ttyS0) and I have successfully tried a couple things with one of them. We tried booting with the talking lilo prompt (I made a boot disk specially for that). The synth talked on the lilo prompt, but, we got as far as "uncompressing Linux, OK" then everything froze no matter what we did. We're wondering if this is something that's happening with newer hardware. Steve (one of the people involved) may try this on his 486 later on (since it has older hardware) and see if the same thing happens, but, it sounds like a problem that's going to rear its ugly head more often as newer hardware comes on the scene. Any ideas? Thanks!