Re: Can grub be made to talk?
I can't count the number of times I have said, to myself,
"Speech/Braille/you name it; should be in some kind of low-level
jail on a computer that starts before anything else does and is
the last thing to go dark before the power goes off."
Petitboot is what I was thinking of even if I can't claim credit
for any of these ideas so I am very happy to see that the experts
are thinking along these same lines.
We have a form of this functionality but it keeps getting
trampled by the entropy of progress.
Linux kernels have had serial tty's for as long as they
have existed. One could get command-line control of a unix-like
system by making a serial terminal talk or emboss Braille.
In the older days, maybe that was all your serial
terminal could do but as long as the serial connection was up,
one had control and feedback from lights on to lights out.
Modern computers routinely do not have native serial
ports any more so that's one complication.
Also, computer users who are blind need a whole other
system to get that functionality, the old terminal connected to
main frame model with smaller parts.
The classic computer science definition of input, output
and control are ignored at great peril because trying to put
alternate access back together is like cranking the sausage
machine backwards and wondering why live animals aren't jumping
out of the other end. Cows that have become hamburger meat have
0 milk production so one needs to plan ahead.
Not in a million years am I suggesting we go back to
talking dumb terminals and RS-232 cables that are always the
wrong gender or should be a null-modem when all you have handy is
a straight-through cable, but machine-processable I/O should
always be there in some form.
The only real solution may be absurdly complex and that
is a super version of that one more computer we all need to make
this or that accessible.
It would consist of a video frame grabber, software to
decode text and make sense of it fed to speakup or a Braille
terminal. I'm not holding my breath.
As it stands, the petitboot idea is modular and feasible.
For those who don't think much about the insides of a computer,
that loopback ip address of 127.0.0.1 is one way that processes
sharing the same chassis communicate even if their parents are
different.
It might even be that petitboot with speakup could be
self-contained enough to be added separately and independently of
other software which might even work down to the bare metal such
as settup of the BIOS but there probably isn't a standard way to
grab that text and use it.
Just some thoughts.
Martin
Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> writes:
> Hello,
>
> In addition to what was said:
>
> - grub is in C, so no need for learning assembly to contribute sound
> drivers to it :)
>
> - the plan was to add sound support to grub, and pre-synthesize boot
> entry texts for grub to play. This plan is still only in todo lists,
> though.
>
> - petitboot is an interesting approach: you boot a Linux kernel that
> only runs petitboot, and there you can run a screen reader such as
> brltty. That can then boot the real kernel for the targetted system.
>
> Samuel
>
>
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