-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all. Not having the need myself to do this yet, thanks to the availability of at least one on-board serial port, I was curious to find out what is the status of installing distros without serial ports these days? I know that all the popular distros, and probably the less popular ones can be used just fine without rs232 ports, thanks to speech-dispatcher/speechd-up/espeak/festival/flite/whatever, what I'm specifically wondering about is the ability of getting an install successfully done. I understand that a telnet install can be done with fc, and that you can do an install with speech on ubuntu and grml, but what about distros like plain debian, or slackware for example? In the case of debian, I suppose one could use debootstrap under grml, but let's assume one wants to specifically use debian's install media, official, or unofficial (I.E. Shane's iso). Also, I know one can remove the hd from the machine to be installed, put it into another machine, install, and put it back in the first machine, having an installed and ready to talk system. However, for the purposes of my question, let's assume one doesn't want to and/or can't do that. If one has access to a linux-supported usb to rs232 converter, can an install of debian/slackware be done over a serial console, until one gets to the point where software speech can be run? Due to the fact that both mentioned distros use dialogue these days, I'd think the answer to the serial console install is no, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Finally, to throw another complication in, what happens if one gets a kernel/system panic of some sort during boot, when speech isn't available yet, and you don't have a serial port? Or isn't that an issue anymore with the use of an initrd, which I'm still not using here? If someone who has done an install without serial ports of distros not supporting software speech on the install media could address these questions, or any other issues that come up, I'd be interested in reading your comments. Greg - -- web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) - -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGETM37s9z/XlyUyARAtnpAJ94OspV0WFS6iQ2xBbayyRNmW34MgCgw8Sd y+vM09QaieMbD6vlKC4fK88= =I3kd -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
