starting alternativ cd in textmode

[Tony Bernedal]

Hi all.
Is there anyone out there knowing how on this earth to start the
ubuntu 9.04 alternativ cd in textmode.
As I understand the documentation there is a bootpromt at the start if
you press tab.
I typed in DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text and press enter.
After a little while the cd stopped and I press enter again. after
that my braille display is detected and I can pres alt+f2 to open a
new shell and type brltty and it starts.
Now switching back to shel 1 and on the display I see "screen not in text mode"
I also tried with serial connection to another computer with boot
command console=ttyS0 but no luck.
What can be wrong here? Is there another way to get the text installer to work?
This machine have too little ram to run the ordinary live cd with
talking installer so I wanted to try the alternative cd. All over the
net it says that there is a text installer but I can not get it to
work.
Any ideas are welcome.
Regards Tony