Nearest successful install was with slackware 11.0 and earlier tonight I got some help disabling the built-in ethernet socket on the motherboard. Unfortunately though a lynxsys is found in another slot it can't get a dhcp because no broadcast addresses could be found by dhclient and I also suspect dhcpcd though dhcpcd exits quietly without complaint. This so far was using the speakup.s kernel 2.4.x which has no nvidia support available. I'm wondering if it would likely be worthwhile to use the amd-64 athelon kernel and install emacspeak on the system for speech.