Speakup on a Dell Enspiron 2600

[Martin McCormick]

	I am going to enherit a Dell Enspiron 2600 laptop which
is about 5 years old, has no serial ports built in and 256 megs
of RAM. Should I be able to get a talking boot from a Ubanto
live CD? Do I have to use gnome?

	This is quite a bit different from my other Linux
installations at home and at work. There, I have used serial
ports to install Debian and fed those serial ports in to A P.C.
still running DOS, a screen reader I wrote in assembler and an
Echo Speech synthesizer, being terminally cheap by my own
admission.

	In order to get the benefit of a laptop, I don't want to
need to drag and power lots of external stuff so this is a good
time to modernize things.

	I would think that the sooner the installation CD starts
talking, the less problems there will be in getting started. Not
having a serial port built in is a real pain since that is one
good way to begin an installation independently as you all are
painfully aware.

	I have nothing against gnome or learning something new,
but this laptop presently only has 256 megs of RAM and that
might be pushing things a bit.

	Thanks for any good suggestions or pointers to specific
instructions on getting past the initial setup period.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group