Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Tony Baechler]

I don't know a lot about Ubuntu, but I've read that if you boot directly 
to the installer instead of the live CD, it will take a while but it 
will install and work fine with 256 MB of RAM.  You might need sighted 
help, I'm not sure if the installer talks or not but it sounds like it 
wouldn't in your case anyway.  If you don't mind giving it a try, I 
would be interested to know if Orca works after the install without 
booting into the live CD.  Also, on a machine here with the same amount 
of memory, I always had to start Orca manually after it booted, even 
though I had sighted help verify that I was in fact booting into the 
mode where speech should come up automatically.  Once I manually started 
Orca, it was very slow but it eventually came up.  I would definitely 
not recommend running solely from the live CD because it's painfully 
slow but just doing an install is supposed to work.

Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	I did try the ubuntu live CD with orca and it did find
> the sound card because you can hear the bongo drums but the 256
> megs of RAM are not sufficient to make it all go when booting
> from the live CD so I am hoping that a thinner live CD will be
> the answer.
>