thinkpad: serial port working now!!!

[Cheryl Homiak]

 I always say I'm going to give up on such things, but I can never bring myself
to quit trying one thing or another!
I'm not totally sure what finally got it to work. One new thing I did was to go
to to the thinkpad info at sourceforge and thence to the ftp link for uttpcdos
(DOS thinkpad utilities). I put these on the floppy with my very barebones
config.sys and autoexec.bat and booted. I then typed in the lines of ser.bat
individually rather than running the .bat. I rebooted and tested by sending an
echo to com1, not really expecting anything. I got a bunch of xxxxxxx back so
tried the debian boot floppies. speakup came up talking.
Only, I can see I must get at least the numeric keypad immediately. If I let
speakup prattle on during the loading of the rescue disk it eventually stops
talking; this can be fixed by turning it back on via the inser/enter on the
numeric keypad. haven't tried to figure out yet whether I can do that at that
stage of loading with the shift+f10; if I can't, doubletalk doesn't start up
again when I put in the rootdisk so I have no speech.
Unfortunately, the brltty disks I have aren't working either, but I don't think
it has to do with the braillelite. I don't get any activity when I put the
rootdisk in, before i even get to loading brltty, so I think it has something to
do with the kernel which is 2.2.20, which unfortunately is the default woody
kernel. the speakup disks I have use 2.4.17. So there's maybe a problem between
my thinkpad and that 2.2.20 kernel which I will have to eventually sort out.
One I get over the installation hump, of course, yasr and emacspeak are also
options.
One
thing I am wondering about:  whatever screen reader I use for installation,
I am doing the first steps with floppies. However, since I don't have my modem
or ethernet up and running and may not have those until i can compile a special
kernel and install, I need to install packages by cdrom. Is there any way I can
switch from the floppy to the cdrom in the ultrabay without turning the machine
off? Otherwise, I'm going to have trouble installing packages and completing the
debian 3.0 installation. At one time there was a debian woody speakup iso I
think, but i don't
see that now. At any rate, these debian 3.0 are still the pre-release and i
don't know if that will cause problems or not.
But i'm pretty happy--I've discovered dos and linux thinkpad utilities and MY
SERIAL PROT WORKS! FINALLY!!!
thanks to all who gave advice.

Cheryl