Ok, I will try to address two or three questions at one time. I accidentally set this subscription up the wrong way so that I get the digest form of all the mails from the list, so I will have to change it in a few minutes. Well, question 1: the machines I tried the GRML disk on to see if they would boot. The first one, a machine on display at a local Circuit City store, was, indeed, an HP. It booted, then came the funny failure message about the 128 samples. Someone on here said he tried to boot ubuntu in an hp machine with an amd 64 X 2 dual core and it didn't even boot. Well, that should solve that question. The second machine, one on display at Sam's Club, might have been an HP, but I didn't look on the side of the casing to see if the raised letters hp were there, so I do not know. It might have been, but the message was the same. Now, the question about the software speech. GRML comes with eflite and flite. It works with speakup, and here's how you do it. You might need some sighted assistance, the first time, but I don't think you will if you can hear the drive spin. first step: put the disk in and start the machine. The drive will spin for a short time, then stop. Second step: When the drive finishes its first short spin, you need to enterthis: grml swspeak You need to be sure that you spell it right, or you will end up having to reboot in order to try over. third step: Listen for the sound to come up. It will not be loud, because GRML only brings up the mixer setting for the alsa pcm device to 75%. You will year the words: finished activating software speakup, just run swspeak when booting finished You will know that you are successfully into the speech interface when this happens. fourth step: When the boot sequence is almost finished, you will hear the words: finished booting Now, enter swspeak and wait a while to see if you can hear the system come up talking. You will need to do this: fifth step: enter this: aumix -w 100 This will bring the sound all the way up. Now, if all went well, you should be ready to do something with it. Now, I haven't gotten that far in reading the digest yet, but there was something on there about connecting to the net using GRML. You can do it with w3m. It takes quite a bit of space to explain how to do it exactly, but I will be more than happy to work with you. Hope this helps. -- I use grml (http://grml.org/)
