Re: Braille support for Debian
On Sun, 28 Jan 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
> About 15 years ago I did a votrax interface for a blind student.
> I've never worked with a versabraille.
This isn't actually a VersaBraille - it has no keyboard of its own (well,
not for normal typing, anyway), and just plugs into a normal PC. Apart
from that, the principle is similar.
> In the long term, some kernel
> support is warranted as it would be nice to see the boot-time messages
> before the system comes up. LILO can already drive a serial console.
Quite.
> In the short-term, I will be making a boot disk soon (about a week?)
> and can make it operate the braille device if you can finish your
> package before then.
To be honest, that would be a bit ambitious - I wouldn't like to promise
that. I'm still waiting for a couple of guys in Montreal to update their
drivers (they have different makes of Braille display to the one I use ...).
And the documentation isn't finished ...
Even so, there is the small problem of the number of possibilities: there
are a minimum of three major manufacturers (Tieman B.V., Netherlands;
TeleSensory Inc., USA; Alva, Japan?), and then there's no telling which
serial port the user will want to use ...
One thing I've done is a script to copy a working installation directly
onto a root floppy: it copies the executable and itself, creates the data
directory and copes the files, and makes /.../dev/vcsa0 if necessary. In
principle, would this work with your rootdisks?
There's still the sysvinit problem, of course ...
Nikhil.
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