Greg, I agree with you about the usefulness of the initrd, and that's why I have never mastered it before. In this case, I began with Shane's precompiled kernel package, which did use one, and I was looking for the simplest way to move up to 2.6.18. So at the moment, I am using 2.6.18 with an initrd prepared by the procedure Shane posted here. Not sure I see any difference so far. I am booting with speakup_quiet flag set on, and with speakup_synth set to ltlk. However, at the end of my rc.local I use speakwith to bring up a software synth. So I can start easily with or without my ltlk on the system. Maybe the initrd would permit configuring software speech much earlier in the boot process, but I have not messed with that. Chuck -- The Moon is Waxing Crescent (34% of Full) Only 10 kinds of people: those who do binary, and those who do not. But you can get a few downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh
