Yet another reason to love slackware :) http://gulus.usherbrooke.ca/pub/distro/slackware/slackware-11.0/bootdisks/ Speakup kernel in above link. I looked all over the deb site and don't find it. The install directions for sarge mentioned speakup and had a link to where the floppy images were, but it's a dead link and no such files I could find. It would be worthwhile to make a floppy or cdrom or both with the speakup enabled kernel for situations like this. Even to find out what is wrong with the debian install, the speakup.s kernel in above link would be useful, you could use it to boot into console with speakup and at least check the partitions on the drive and such. Gregory Nowak said: Be aware that if you use the above disks, you won't have access to speakup.