laptops with serial ports

[Debee Norling]

My experience with PCMCIA serial ports is that Speakup loads too early. The
kernel needs to load socket drivers and card services and such.

But what's worked for me is to use BRLTTY on a PCMCIA or USB serial port and
use Speakup on the hardware serial port, if you are lucky enough to have a
laptop with one.

If you don't have a hardware port and your laptop can use a port replicator
or docking station you can sometimes locate one of those on ebay especially
if it isn't a brand-new laptop.  I have a Sony Vaio and a Toshiba Libretto
which don't have serial ports but their docking stations do.

If you don't want to haul around a hefty docking station, then use it for
just installing/troubleshooting; get your software speech working and then
ditch the docking station.

Another trick is to install on a hard drive that's temporarily cabled to a
PC with a serial port. Then install the hard drive in your laptop.  To find
an engineer you trust to do this if you aren't mechanical enough yourself,
make friends with your local ham radio club. Luckily I'm married to an
electrical engineer so moving IDE drives around just goes on the "honey-do"
list.

As for PCMCIA ports they are still around. But you have to google for
surplus computer parts. Here in Silicon Valley I trust Weird Stuff Warehouse
and Surplus Computers -- both stores do worldwide web sales. They're also
good places for docking stations, but when you buy a surplus peripheral, do
your homework and be sure you know the exact part/model number.

--Debee
* it is generally more convenient to simply fantasize doing a thing, than it
is to go to  all the trouble of actually doing it.
-- The SnowMan