qemu with braille and curses
Hello,
Just to advertise that the current testing version of qemu (actually,
starting from 0.9.1-4) has an ncurses interface as well as virtual
braille support. That means you can
dd < /dev/zero > img bs=1M count=1 seek=2000
qemu -cdrom debian-install.iso -hda img -curses -k fr
That will boot the debian installer CD-ROM (press Enter when it says
"Graphic mode", because it is just the isolinux graphical prompt), and
you'll get to the debian installer on a VT console.
Note the -k fr which is necessary if your keyboard is a french one, see
/usr/share/qemu/keymaps for the others.
About the braille support, you can run
qemu -cdrom debian-install.iso -hda img -curses -k fr -usbdevice braille
which will emulate a braille device and show the result on your real
braille device via brlapi/brltty. That permits e.g. to test the
braillified debian installer without having to boot it for real.
Note to sighted people: you can use the latter by running
brltty -b xw -A auth=user
which will display a fake braille device on your X server.
Samuel
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