one more quickie, remains removing speakup from memory.

[Tim Chase]

On January 25, 2015, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> The answer to this one will let me know if I should try removing
> speakup before the extra help is here.

I wouldn't bother.  If it pesters the person helping you, it should
be a fairly straightforward matter to just mute the audio,
turn down the audio, disconnect the speakers, or plug in headphones
that your friend isn't wearing.  That is, even if speakup is running,
it should be fairly easy to ignore it.

> Does speakup give a verbal confirmation once removed?

It depends on how you "remove" it.  If you just disable its
interaction by using the print-screen button, it may or may not
announce that fact.  Others here could confirm that.  If you disable
the speakup module with "sudo rmmod ...", you wouldn't get any sort
of warning.

> The test fir ip information is clear so it will be simply a matter
> of noting the results..assuming there are any.

If the machine is attached to the router via the network cable
and booted up, a simple "ifconfig" should let you know the IP address
it has. If you want just the IP addresses, you can limit it with

  /sbin/ifconfig | grep "inet addr"

If all goes according to plan, you should likely get back something
like

  inet addr:192.168.1.64

followed by additional information about the broadcast address and
network mask.

The person setting up the machine may have set it up to make dial-up
easy, but they would have had to go out of their way to disable
regular ethernet-card networking.  Unfortunately, the checks differ
depending on whether "network-manager" is installed.  You can check
this with

  dpkg --get-selections | grep network-manager

If it comes back with one or more resuts and says "install" after
it, you have Network Manager installed.  You can then use

  nmcli con list

to list any active connections.  Hopefully it will list your wired
connection.

If you *don't* have network manager installed, you should be able to
peek in /etc/network/interfaces which should have a line something
like

  iface eth0 inet dhcp

in it which would instruct it to use your first ethernet card
(eth0) to get a DHCP address for internet communications.

I'm eager to get you over this hurdle so you can actually have fun
with the box rather than fighting with it. (grins)

-tim