Finding the Correct Debian Speakup Image

[Martin McCormick]

Samuel Thibault writes:
> That's squeeze, not wheezy, and is thus not supposed to have
> software speech. Wheezy will be version 7 and is currently labeled
> as "testing".  I don't know how you ended up with it.  All links on
> http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ point to daily builds of
> Wheezy.

	Well, I was being stupid. I was looking for the same
sort of ISO images you find in the stable version as in squeeze.
I just wandered off the developer page and back in to the
squeeze links.

	After going back to the developer page, I got both the
businesscard ISO and the ISO for the wheezy netinst image.

	I am pleased to say that the Pentium3 system which has
basically choked on every version of debian and ubuntu over the
last year does work fine from the netinst image. The last Linux
that talked on that system was ubuntu's desktop for ubuntu 9.10
but it couldn't keep from crashing long enough to be of any use.

	All the ubuntu distros starting with 10.x through 11.x
came up with no sound at all but displayed the gnome desktop and
appeared to try to run the espeak synthesizer silently which
isn't much good for us. I am fairly certain that the problem was
in the basic sound system as no system sounds came through
either.

	Wheezy talks just fine on that system and the
installation routine appeared to work but I think I have been
bitten by that grub installer bug someone else mentioned.

	After Wheezy installed, the netinst CDROM installed some
more software from the network and then complained about grub
not being there and that it would install 1. It said it did but
things went down hill fast from there.

	The reboot after removal of the netinstall disk briefly
brought up speakup long enough to spew a monster load of errors
about alsa and other sound-related applications not being
present.

	After that, the kernel never gets started and I have run
in to that infuriating thing which Dell BIOS'es do which seems
to be to self-reprogram their boot sequence to move the hard
drive to the top. I've got to get some help to force it back to
CDROM first so I can try to rescue what otherwise appears to be
a good installation.

	Outside world peace and an end to hunger, I would love
to se a BIOS backup to force things back to how they are needed.

	Anyway, Wheezy appears to get the audio subsystems
working again.

	For the sake of automation, I did try to remaster the
netinst CD to in clude the "s" boot parameter. What I got was an
image slightly smaller than the original ISO which actually
appears to work but only if you manually type

linux s

at the boot prompt. This is no different from the actual image.

	The command I gave remaster-append.sh was

remaster-append.sh "s" ISO_image new_iso_image  and then I
tried 

remaster-append.sh "linux s" iso_image newiso_image

which I didn't think was necessary but might as well try, and
still got the slightly smaller image that really didn't work any
differently than the original image.

	Anyway, the glass is half full but there is a leak
somewhere.