I am going to enherit a Dell Enspiron 2600 laptop which is about 5 years old, has no serial ports built in and 256 megs of RAM. Should I be able to get a talking boot from a Ubanto live CD? Do I have to use gnome? This is quite a bit different from my other Linux installations at home and at work. There, I have used serial ports to install Debian and fed those serial ports in to A P.C. still running DOS, a screen reader I wrote in assembler and an Echo Speech synthesizer, being terminally cheap by my own admission. In order to get the benefit of a laptop, I don't want to need to drag and power lots of external stuff so this is a good time to modernize things. I would think that the sooner the installation CD starts talking, the less problems there will be in getting started. Not having a serial port built in is a real pain since that is one good way to begin an installation independently as you all are painfully aware. I have nothing against gnome or learning something new, but this laptop presently only has 256 megs of RAM and that might be pushing things a bit. Thanks for any good suggestions or pointers to specific instructions on getting past the initial setup period. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
