Apologies for not being as up on all this stuff as maybe I should be and
presumably the rest of you are, but Linux isn't, nor has it ever been,
an interest of mine--I only use it because I have to, and begrudgingly
at that. I find the whole concept obtuse, confusing, confounding,
unreasonably complicated, and not made to actually get things done in an
efficient manner for the average Joe User in the world. But that doesn't
mean I won't do what I have to do in order to use it, and I certainly
would not spend a nanosecond bashing it--it has its uses, just not very
many of them for me, except when I'm forced into it by the things I'm
asked to do with computers at times. Give me OpenVMS or MS Windows any day.
With that disclaimer out of the way ...
John was extremely helpful--instrumental, in fact--in setting me up with
a talking grml so I could turn on ssh and just get in there from another
machine and copy off what I need from my old system. This didn't work
out because I can't figure out how to get my network started on the
target system. It doesn't look on the wired network for my Dream Machine
router, which is happily sitting there, ready, willing and able to
provide a network address for anyone who comes a-calling. On said target
system, lspci shows the device, lsmod shows the driver, netcardconfig
lets me set it up with the proper address, subnet and broadcast values,
but, as I pointed out to John, even after all that, the system can't see
past the end of its network nose. I've given up (for now) trying to
figure out why this is. Instead, I copied the files I needed from the
old system to the grml thumb drive for later usage, and am now ready to
install real Debian 12--should I really try 13?--on the old internal SSD.
However, here's where I've run into a Speakup/ESpeak problem. The
grml-debootstrap script displays choices just like standard
character-cell Linux always does, but with one exception: there's
nothing I can find to figure out which of the selections is the chosen
one--there are no symbols between the graphic brackets to indicate that,
unlike most other character-cel interfaces that put a star ("*") or
graphic symbol that looks like a square in between the brackets. I
looked for a Speakup user guide, and the only one I could find is from
2010. How do I figure out which option is chosen on these menus, and
where's a more up-to-date Speakup manual that would contain this info?
Again, a really big thank-you to John, who spent probably far longer
trying to troubleshoot me through my network problem than he have to.
This stuff is supposed to just work, but when it doesn't, finding the
one link in the long chain that's not behaving or doesn't exist can be
daunting. Just look at some of the recent posts under the banner "I Want
to Love Linux But Linux Won't Love Me Back," and if you don't already
know, you'll find out how frustrating things can be when they don't work
as expected.
