For anyone who is interested: I have finally worked out that it is not a problem with my Toshiba laptop that is making the bns on the Braille Lite stop speaking half way through a sentence or what ever. It is actually if you give a rong root kernel parameter and it does a kernel panic cause it can't find a root device. I've never had this trouble with a doubletalk pc though, So I'd be interested to know if other people with serial synths have the same problem if they try to use an invalid root device. Mick -- Michael D. Curran www: http://redgum.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/~mdcurran/ MSN: mick at jantrid.net ICQ: 113763334 AIM: manchi2003