Well, you did ask for a command line interface. Had you asked for a graphical user interface, I would have suggested you boot int Ubuntu. I would say you are fairly knowledgable given that Linux is not your native operating system. If you want to keep trying, I think you're doing fine. Although you might have more success with Ubuntu. Anyway, I doknow the answers to your current questions. I never use the GRML menus. As a Linux sys admin, all I care about is getting to a point where I can type in commands. Honestly, from what you've told me so far, I think you probably do have a network connection. Did you check the activity on your router to see if it recognized a new device and assigned it an IP address? On my home network, I point a browser to http://192.168.1.254 and there's a button there to display a list of all the devices on the home network. I can see that it assigned my laptop the IP address 192.168.1.211 for example. Of course, how to do that would depend on your router. But it's a good thing to know at any rate. PS: The reason I'm willing to help you is that I believe in paying forward. The world would suck if it really was every man for himself. I don't want to live in a world like that. In fact, i refuse to live in a world like that even if I'm the only one who doesn't. As long as you continue to have a positive attitude, I'm willing to keep helping. On 6/1/25 10:26 AM, Steve Matzura via Blind-sysadmins wrote:
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.
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