Re: Can grub be made to talk?
Wow! Thanks. As I said in an earlier message, I dodged the
bullet this time in that I should be able to protect the old
development system with a chroot jail. The assembler and
debugger/emulator that won't make in newer versions of debian should
still work and, assuming I can get a serial port to run from
inside the jail, that should be good enough.
The tune sequence you describe using play has another
interesting possibility. Amateur radio operators used to have to
learn the Morse Code for telegraphy. One could make dots and
dashes in Morse or CW as amateurs call it and actually spell out
things.
Again thanks.
Didier Spaier <didier@slint.fr> writes:
> Hello Martin,
>
>
> I absolutely hate what I call "press and pray" in which
> the silent world prevails and you count button presses in the
> silence and hope and pray that nothing weird happens.
>
> GRUB can't be made to talk, but it can play songs using its
> play command. So you can have it play a different tune for each
> boot entry.
>
> There are basically two ways to do that:
> 1. Use a custom /boot/grub/grub.cfg that include 'play' commands with an
> argument that differ for each boot entry.
> I have done that in EFI3M that works only if booted in EFI mode:
> https://github.com/DidierSpaier/EFI3M.
>
> You need to insert the play GRUB module before using the 'play' command:
> insmod grub
>
> Quoting the README:
> -------------------
> As shown EFI3M also allows the user to easily customize the boot menu,
> modifying the label of a boot entry (how it is displayed), hiding it,
> reordering the boot entries, setting the delay before auto boot.
>
> To help the visually impaired, the boot menu optionally plays a sound at
> startup, a tune of n sounds when starting the boot entry number n, and
> specific tunes for reboot and halt
> ------------------
> The menu of EFI3M is fully accessible with speech.
>
> 2. Run update-grub or grub-mkconfig as usual, but write a script to post
> process grub.cfg to provide similar features.
> I didn't do that yet, it's in my TODO list but far from the top.
>
> Also, at least you can set the default boot entry in /etc/default/grub
> There are numbered from 0.
>
> You can also if installed run as root grub-emu from a console (not a
> graphical terminal). It will display a preview of what will be the real
> GRUB menu at boot time, accessible with speech through espeakup and
> fenrir (do not try in a graphical terminal, Orca can't read it).
>
>
> Failing speech, I know grub can be configured to work
> through a serial port if one exists at the time grub is needed.
> Is there a good document anywhere dealing with all these
> issues?
>
>
> Just type:
> info grub
>
> To use a serial console, you can edit grub.cfg to
> include before the boot entries these commands:
> serial
> terminal_input --append serial
> terminal_output --append serial
>
> The 'serial' GRUB command takes optional parameters, the default are:
> port 0
> speed 9600 bauds
> 8 data bits
> stop bit
> parity none
>
> Good luck,
>
> Didier
>
>
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