Re: speakup Debian installer; also booting from cdrom and adding brltty

[Cheryl Homiak]

last night I made a bootable cd from the accessible boot.img at 
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/floppy/access since my 
desktop computer's bios can be 
made to boot either from cdrom or floppy but I can't change them back and 
forth by myself. I then put the root floppy in when it was requested. by 
doing this I found that both brltty and speakup do start up ok. However, I 
ran into a problem; when I went to download installer components the 
kernel modules couldn't be found and the suggested reason was that my 
kernel didn't match the ones on the mirror. do I have to use a particular 
mirror to get modules for the 2.4.27 speakup-enabled kernel? Or is it 
possible I did something to cause a problem when I made the bootable cd; I 
used the el Torrito method. I'd like to be able to put both root.img and 
boot.img both on the cd but my attempts to change where the root files are 
looked for haven't worked yet and I'm still reading up on isolinux. At any 
rate, using the floppy with root.img appears to work for the time being.

I also have a second question. with woody, I am able to boot from the 
cdrom and then use
tar xzf /dev/fd0
to copy brltty from a floppy disk image into the running root system. then 
I can type
dbootstrap
and am able to continue with the install in text mode.
However, I can't do this with any of the sarge cds. I get "no such file or 
directory" when I try to do the tar command using /dev/fd0. However, the 
floppy is definitely being used for the root image and for loading 
drivers. I do realize that the new installer is completely different 
from the old one used with woody, but is there a way of accessing the 
floppy deliberately from the 
shell? I don't particularly want to mount the floppy but I need to be able 
to untar the image that's on the floppy I have in what should be /dev/fd0. 
If I could use the floppy from the shell to add brltty I could install 
booting from debian cds without having to use any special access floppies 
or cds unless I also wanted speakup--that is, if dbootstrap can still be 
used.
Tia.

--
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."