status of installs without serial ports

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hi all.

Not having the need myself to do this yet, thanks to the availability
of at least one on-board serial port, I was curious to find out what
is the status of installing distros without serial ports these days? I
know that all the popular distros, and probably the less popular ones
can be used just fine without rs232 ports, thanks to
speech-dispatcher/speechd-up/espeak/festival/flite/whatever, what I'm
specifically wondering about is the ability of getting an install
successfully done. I understand that a telnet install can be done with
fc, and that you can do an install with speech on ubuntu and grml, but
what about distros like plain debian, or slackware for example? In the
case of debian, I suppose one could use debootstrap under grml, but
let's assume one wants to specifically use debian's install media,
official, or unofficial (I.E. Shane's iso). Also, I know one can
remove the hd from the machine to be installed, put it into another
machine, install, and put it back in the first machine, having an
installed and ready to talk system. However, for the purposes of my
question, let's assume one doesn't want to and/or can't do that.

If one has access to a linux-supported usb to rs232 converter, can an
install of debian/slackware be done over a serial console, until one
gets to the point where software speech can be run? Due to the fact
that both mentioned distros use dialogue these days, I'd think the
answer to the serial console install is no, but I thought I'd ask
anyway.

Finally, to throw another complication in, what happens if one gets
a kernel/system panic of some sort during boot, when speech isn't
available yet, and you don't have a serial port? Or isn't that an
issue anymore with the use of an initrd, which I'm still not using
here?

If someone who has done an install without serial ports of distros
not supporting software speech on the install media could address
these questions, or any other issues that come up, I'd be interested
in reading your comments.

Greg


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