best way to install linux to a laptop

[Jacob Schmude]

Vic
     You could, I suppose, replace the RH kernel, but I would not call this a trivial task. First, you'd need to mount the ISO image, then basically copy everything over to a writable irectory. If anyone knows differently, I'd love to be corrected on this. Then you can replace the kernel in that directory, but that won't do you a bit of good. I don't know how to get the bootable image out of the ISO 9660 image, which is what you'd have to do. The reason for this is that, the way that ISO9660 images are made bootable, is to have a 1.44 or larger floppy image written at the beginning of them. I'm not sure how red hat creates ther ISO's and how they layout their boot image, so I really don't know how you'd make an RH cd bootable. I suppose you could try and use the dd command. Something like this perhaps:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=floppy.img bs=1k count=1.44k
but I don't know how good of a result that will give you.
     Having LILO talk through the serial port isn't difficult, however, Some synthesizers won't speak until they receive a special character. Some cases of this are the dectalks, which expect a punctuation mark, and the doubletalks, which expect a carriage return or a NULL character. These two are no problems, but I'm not sure about the BNS or any of the other synths speakup supports. Definitely worth looking into.
     Now, the big problem, again, the boot image. Because of the way iso9660 cds are made bootable, how do you expect to fit all those kernels in the boot image and still have room for the data? Remember, you can't access kernels on the cd from that boot image, so you can't just copy a kernel to the cd and try to load it. Remember that each kernel is about 500K or more, and don't forget the initrd ram-based bootdisk, there goes another 800k at least. Suppose you could try and make it bootable using dtlk.img (or whatever), but I doubt if this will work, as I suspect they use a large boot image.
Victor Tsaran writes:
 > Actually, once I thought about this. What if I, for instance, reburn
 > Redhat's CD, but instead of their kernel put the Speakup-powered one? This
 > means I could have a Speaking installation CD of Redhat, right? Now, in the
 > boot part of CD installation, one could implement a LILO which could speak
 > through the serial port and have the entries for all known to SPeakup
 > synthesizers. After users choose the ones they need, LILO would load
 > necessary kernel. Do you think, such a scheme would work?