I wonder if anyone has thoughts about this situation. I am using the speakup-enabled Sarge iso from Shane's site. I've used this CD to successfully install Debian on a variety of computers. But the current problem is a laptop that has a PCMCIA floppy and a PCMCIA CD-rom. It can't boot any distro's install floppies, because though its BIOS boots the first one fine, Linux, and not the bios is in control when prompting the user to insert the second floppy which is usually a root disk. And Linux doesn't support this laptop's quirky floppy drive. It can't load the install from CD-ROM because it can't boot from the CD-rom. So I was able to put the kernel, vmlinuz, from the speakup subdirectory on to a DOS partition. I also put the corresponding initrd there as well. Then I copied loadlin to the same partition and created this batch file to boot the install from DOS: loadlin vmlinuz initrd=initrd.gz append root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=17000 devfs=mount,dall vga=normal speakup_synth=bns That actually worked. I had to tweak the batch file several times, but the line above did the trick. The kernel booted, the initrd was loaded, speakup spoke and the install talked all the way through. One problem was that even though the debian installer docs claim that a component called Isoseek will locate an iso image on the hard disk to install from, it didn't run. The installer never called it. But after all the PCMCIA drivers loaded, the installer could auto-detect my CD-rom and pull the remaining components it needed from there. The installer docs also claim that you can use the net boot or the hard disk install images, which are a kernel with their corresponding initrd.gz files, and not need a CD-ROM. But only the net install image appears to have been speakup-modified, and it appears not to run isoseek. The Net boot and the net install images are different, and the hard disk install image is yet a different kernel and initrd combo. So I couldn't see a way around that. I do wish speakup was better integrated in to all the install images for Sarge. Nevertheless it did auto-detect my PCMCIA cd-rom and it did talk all the way through partitioning and setting up the network. It then loaded the base system and was ready to reboot. But after the install re-booted, it had somehow loaded a non-speaking kernel. My husband reading the screen confirmed that it is booting fine, and the base-config menu that is run at first boot appears. I can go into other consoles and log on as root and issue shell commands. But Debian isn't configured yet, only the base system packages are installed. And it appears to have used some other kernel other than the talking one I installed with. The installer usually picks the speakup kernel and boots up talking, but this time it was in "low memory mode" so perhaps that means it thinks it should default to a different kernel. I thought that when I booted, I could simply type console=ttyS0 At the boot prompt and use my BNS as a terminal to finish up the base-config steps. If that had worked I could have then used apt-get to download and install the speakup-enabled kernel. But "console=ttyS0" doesn't work either. Does anyone have ideas about how I can access the system to finish configuring it? Remember, I can't boot a rescue disk because its floppy drive isn't supported under Linux. And I also cannot ssh, telnet nor even ftp to it yet because those daemons aren't yet running. Does anyone know why "console=ttyS0" would not work at the boot prompt? --Debee * The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.
