Tom, I had both for a time, and may do so again. What I found work best was to have two kernels, identical in all ways but one. One kernel had Speakup patched in, the other did not. I had them on floppies, but you could use loadlin, lilo, whatever. A warning: When running Emacspeak, be sure the Speakup keymap isn't getting loaded. For that matter, and perhaps more important, be sure your Speakup key map loads when you're running Speakup. -Dave