three small installer questions?

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 12:18:35AM -0400, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> so, in theory, how long would it normally take for the system to
> reach the boot menu of the installer?  I may be pressing s too soon,

I would say 20-30 seconds from the time you power on the system. If
you can hear the cd-rom drive spin, then that would narrow it down to
somewhere around 5-10 seconds once the cd-rom drive starts to spin and
read the disk. Others here may be able to give you a better estimate
of the time.

> not sure where the beep would come from without a speaker, or if
> there even is a PC speaker.

Your system is more likely to have a pc speaker than not.

>  Since the installer is checking on things, this might take a while.
> Second, as I said above there is a network card in the machine, but
> I am between providers and dsl modems just now.  the network check
> seems later in the install process, but will I be able to bypass
> this test or might everything freeze trying to conduct it?  The
> installer may seek the network ard as hardware even before giving me
> the boot menu options perhaps?

I don't think I've ever run across a distribution installer yet that
checks networking hardware before doing anything else. The lack of a
network connection won't give you trouble. The installer will just
determine that you're not connected to a network, and move on, nothing
should freeze.

> 
> Last of all, I am using the wheezy software speech <or trying to
> lol> for the install but as I have a dectalk express may want to
> change to this for speech once i Manage to install debian.  I do not
> want to try this before, who know the software voice might be
> understandable.

I haven't installed debian past squeeze, but assume that speakup in
the installer you're using still supports hardware synthesizers. If
that's the case, I would strongly recommend using a hardware serial synth if you
have that option. You will find that much easier than unmuting your
sound cards (if that's why you're stuck) given that you're a
beginner. I've been a gnu/linux user for over 10 years now, and would
still choose to install using a hardware synth if I had that option,
especially if getting software speech going was proving problematic.

> still will I be able to configure this  change later, once the
> system is up and running?

Yes, you'll be able to do that, but you'll need to be able to use an
editor, and rebuild your initrd if you want speech ASAP after boot. If
you use the hardware synth during install as I suggested above, this
is one more thing you won't have to worry about.

Greg


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