I always say I'm going to give up on such things, but I can never bring myself to quit trying one thing or another! I'm not totally sure what finally got it to work. One new thing I did was to go to to the thinkpad info at sourceforge and thence to the ftp link for uttpcdos (DOS thinkpad utilities). I put these on the floppy with my very barebones config.sys and autoexec.bat and booted. I then typed in the lines of ser.bat individually rather than running the .bat. I rebooted and tested by sending an echo to com1, not really expecting anything. I got a bunch of xxxxxxx back so tried the debian boot floppies. speakup came up talking. Only, I can see I must get at least the numeric keypad immediately. If I let speakup prattle on during the loading of the rescue disk it eventually stops talking; this can be fixed by turning it back on via the inser/enter on the numeric keypad. haven't tried to figure out yet whether I can do that at that stage of loading with the shift+f10; if I can't, doubletalk doesn't start up again when I put in the rootdisk so I have no speech. Unfortunately, the brltty disks I have aren't working either, but I don't think it has to do with the braillelite. I don't get any activity when I put the rootdisk in, before i even get to loading brltty, so I think it has something to do with the kernel which is 2.2.20, which unfortunately is the default woody kernel. the speakup disks I have use 2.4.17. So there's maybe a problem between my thinkpad and that 2.2.20 kernel which I will have to eventually sort out. One I get over the installation hump, of course, yasr and emacspeak are also options. One thing I am wondering about: whatever screen reader I use for installation, I am doing the first steps with floppies. However, since I don't have my modem or ethernet up and running and may not have those until i can compile a special kernel and install, I need to install packages by cdrom. Is there any way I can switch from the floppy to the cdrom in the ultrabay without turning the machine off? Otherwise, I'm going to have trouble installing packages and completing the debian 3.0 installation. At one time there was a debian woody speakup iso I think, but i don't see that now. At any rate, these debian 3.0 are still the pre-release and i don't know if that will cause problems or not. But i'm pretty happy--I've discovered dos and linux thinkpad utilities and MY SERIAL PROT WORKS! FINALLY!!! thanks to all who gave advice. Cheryl
