Re: speakup Debian installer; also booting from cdrom and adding brltty
Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@charter.net> writes:
> last night I made a bootable cd from the accessible boot.img at
> http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/floppy/access since
> my desktop computer's bios can be made to boot either from cdrom or
> floppy but I can't change them back and forth by myself. I then put
> the root floppy in when it was requested. by doing this I found that
> both brltty and speakup do start up ok. However, I ran into a problem;
> when I went to download installer components the kernel modules
> couldn't be found and the suggested reason was that my kernel didn't
> match the ones on the mirror.
Which mirror, and which distribution (sid/sarge) did you choose
to download from?
> do I have to use a particular mirror to get modules for the 2.4.27
> speakup-enabled kernel?
Not really, I suspect some mismatch in the package propagation to
sarge.
> Or is it possible I did something to cause a problem when I made the
> bootable cd;
>From what I can see, probably not. However, you realize
that the Right Way(TM) to do this would be to
create a new cd targeted image for speakup/brltty using
the current floppy configs as a base-line.
> I used the el Torrito method. I'd like to be able to put both
> root.img and boot.img both on the cd but my attempts to change where
> the root files are looked for haven't worked yet and I'm still
> reading up on isolinux.
Yes, but changing "where the root files are looked for" is not really
the right way. Just use the debian-installer tree to build
yourself an image which includes all the udebs which are
currently spread between boot and root.
> At any rate, using the floppy with root.img appears to work for the
> time being.
>
> I also have a second question. with woody, I am able to boot from the
> cdrom and then use
> tar xzf /dev/fd0
> to copy brltty from a floppy disk image into the running root
> system. then I can type
> dbootstrap
> and am able to continue with the install in text mode.
> However, I can't do this with any of the sarge cds. I get "no such
> file or directory" when I try to do the tar command using
> /dev/fd0. However, the floppy is definitely being used for the root
> image and for loading drivers.
I suspect the device spec is not quite correct (the /dev directly in the
installer is not 100% compatible with the normal /dev structure).
> I do realize that the new installer is completely different from the
> old one used with woody, but is there a way of accessing the floppy
> deliberately from the shell?
Sure, there should be. At least the scripts on the boot.img
does load the root.img files from floppy.
> I don't particularly want to mount the floppy but I need to be able
> to untar the image that's on the floppy I have in what should be
> /dev/fd0. If I could use the floppy from the shell to add brltty I
> could install booting from debian cds without having to use any
> special access floppies or cds unless I also wanted speakup
I dont quite get this, or it feels too hackish to me. The right
way to do this is to let apt-get install brltty into the
installed system, everything else leads to a mess. You really shouldn't
untar arbitrary files onto a freshly installed system, especially not if
they happen to have the same names as a package would provide.
This is OKish for a short term solution, but not really useful if we
want to see real accessibility support in Debian.
> --that is, if dbootstrap can still be used. Tia.
>
> --
> Cheryl
--
CYa,
Mario
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