Install Problem on emachines AMD64 Athlon

Hi all, I was hoping to get some insight into an install problem I am having on my M6805 laptop. I have scoured google, etc to find related problems and found little. Here are the details: When the install process starts (either from hard disk or FTP) after the required info is loaded into the ram disk I get the following (edited for brevity) message: No keyboard detected. Trying to connect via serial interface..." On your terminal computer start the user interface with Y2base... Yast2... When I type "yast2" nothing happens. I really am motivated to get Suse installed on this laptop. Any recommendations (short of plugging in a keyboard which I trying next) would be greatly appreciated. Richard