Installed OK But No Speech

Installed OK But No Speech

[Janina Sajka]

Hi:
This is mainly a note to Gene Collins who's been giving me a direct hand
with a Debian install. But, I'm cc'ing the list to maximize my help
resources! <grin>

I've just concluded installing a base Debian 2.2 on my IBM Thinkpad 560Z.

I'm pretty certain the install went smoothly. No complaints during the
process, at least. Also, I know that lilo is working as it loads and I'm
able to restart with a Control-Alt-Delete.

I have no speech, however. Is that to be expected at this stage? The way I
had speech during the installation was to pass speakup_ser=1 to the
kernel. Seems linux sees my ir port as ttyS0, and my serial as ttyS1.

Anyway, I'm in a new kind of funny position. I tried at first to linload
following a floppy DOS boot. That didn't work because the something in the
process accessed the floppy which just spun and spun. So, I booted Windows
and did a shutdown to MS DOS. On the Thinkpad that forces a reboot into
DOS. But now I can't get back to that DOS prompt because lilo never gave
me the opportunity to specify a second OS. So, I can't now get back to a
hard-disk boot of DOS in order to try and boot my installation from
linload.

Any ideas?

				Janina Sajka, Director
				Information Systems Research & Development
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

janina@afb.net

Re: Installed OK But No Speech

[Geoff Shang]

Hi Janina:

Wow.  What a nice mess you're in. <grin>

Well, it would seem to me that you need to append the speakup_ser=1 in your
lilo.conf file, but I guess you figured that already.  Your primary problem
is, of course, getting to it via speech.

If you've got something like another computer you can hang off the serial
port, you could try logging in as root on the local console and issuing:

/sbin/getty -hL ttyS1 9600 vt100

the h is for hardware flow control and L is for local, whatever that
means.  This should give you a login prompt on the serial port.  This will
of course be of no use if you don't have a user-level account as debian
defaults to not letting root log in this way (you have to su to it
afterwoods).  I presume you don't have a working ethernet setup or you'dve
probably tried this already, though similar restrictions on root logins
probably apply here too.

The other thing I can think of, short of trying loadlin from a dosbox in
windows, is putting in the debian boot disk again and getting speech that
way.  If I remember correctly, you should be able to alt-F2 to another
console and get a bash login prompt.  You could then login as root, mount
any unmounted file systems (you presumably have to get the installer to
mount the root FS first) and do what you need to do before rebooting.  Note
that I'm only going by what I read in the debian 2.0 install manual and
nothing I've said may necessarily apply to the debian 2.2 installer (Gene
and Kirk, comments please).

That's all I can think of off-hand.  Good luck!!

Geoff.