Re: speakup Debian installer; also booting from cdrom and adding brltty
Thanks for replying, Mario.
On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Mario Lang wrote:
Which mirror, and which distribution (sid/sarge) did you choose
to download from?
I tried two or three mirrors; I'd have to check but i believe one of them
was the standard http.us.debian.org. I would have chosen sarge.
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.
Well, there's the right way to do things and then there's the way I can
figure out at present. Certainly I'm working toward learning "the right
way", but in the meantime I'll do what I can figure out.
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.
No, sorry for the confusion but we're talking about two different things
and I see now I didn't make that clear. earlier i was talking about the
cdrom I made from the boot.img but now I'm talking about booting from a
burned cd (first disk) of the sarge weekly cds.
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.
This isn't a freshly installed system; it's just the root system loaded
into ram when I boot the first cd of the sarge set that I've burned; the
install hasn't even begun yet and I don't have internet access yet. I
believe there is a brltty udeb on the cd but I'm not sure i can acccess
and use that at the beginning of the install.
I have actually found a way to use the first cd in the sarge sets with
brltty; while i know it's probably hackish, it will work for me until I
have more knowledge of how to do things. What I did was mount the
install/initrd on a loop device and insert statically linked brltty into
it using the
configuration parameters Dave Mielke uses in the rhmkiso script. I
had
to choose between getting help in and getting all the tables in. I did the
same thing with install/2.6.initrd.gz. then I disabled utf-8 and
framebuffers in the initrds in /libs/debian-installer.d. I don't yet have
the knowledge to make this work from boot, but now I can boot the cdrom
and
choose from the default (linux, linux26, expert and expert26). After this
choice, I am able to switch to the second console and enter:
mknod /dev/tty0 c 4 0
brltty -b bl -d /dev/tts/0
and brltty starts. i can then go back to the first console and work on the
install. i haven't yet done a complete install this way but will be
experimenting with that since I want to get off gentoo and back to debian.
I got the above lines from one of your posts of how you installed sarge;
brltty definitely won't work at this point without the mknod line. I
think I could have possibly specified the device in the brltty
configuration but if I end up sharing this with anybody that might limit
what they can do. I do understand it's not "the right way" and maybe six
months from now I'll look back and wonder why I did it but it appears to
work for me for right now. I do appreciate the pointers on the right way
to do things as I am working on learning. At this point, however, I'm
pleased that i have succeeded in learning how to do bootable cds and
how to add to the initrd; I may not be learning everything at once but i
am gradually gaining skills and learning procedures.
--
Cheryl
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