[BRLTTY] Does the rhmkiso script work for anyone at all?

[Mario Lang]

Mario Lang <mlang at delysid.org> writes:

> The FC4 boot.iso uses the "newc" cpio format, rhmkiso
> forces the oldc format.
> When using the 3.7.2 tarball and the 3.7.2 version of rhmkiso,
> this, and the fact that the ramdisk size seems too small
> prevent the resulting cd from booting, we get a kernel panic, unable
> to mount root fs.

Correction, I *think* what actually happens is that FC4 uses initramfs
instead of initrd (guessed).  initramfs requires a newc cpio archive
IIRC, so the initial check for initramfs probably fails and the kernel
tries to unpack the initrd for conventional file system access which
fails since it is larger than 8192KB.

> I hacked around this, only to get to the point where brltty works,
> but /dev/ttyS0 does not exist.  So much about the released tarball.
> I then tried the latest rhmkiso script from SVN.  But that one
> unfortunately has a hard-dependancy on the fedora MAKEDEV script.
> For instance, the Debian MAKEDEV script does not understand -d and
> -D args.  So at is seems, 3.7.2 scriptage fails, and the svn
> scriptage is now distributiion dependant.

After getting root access on a Fedora box, I managed to run the rhmkiso
script correctly, and the resulting CD actually booted into user space,
but BRLTTY still fails to initialize the display.  The sighted person that
took a look at the screen output for me managed to read some
"Cannt open console... " message scroll by qickly, but we did not have the time
to write it down fully.  The installer menu came up though, only brltty
failed to init my TSI.  I either guess /dev/console is missing
for some reason(do we really need that, is it fatal if it does not
exist) or FC4 actually started udev and made the /dev/ttyS0 device
go away again, again, I did not have the time today to check exactly.

I just wonder, has this ever worked, it feels so broken.

P.S.: I am no Fedora user, so some of my guesses maybe completely
wrong.  I am just trying to get this brltty-enabled fedora install
CD working so that I can use it for a linux-for-the-blind course next
week.

For reference, I use 
"text brltty=ts,ttyS0"
at the boot prompt and built the image with
./rhmkiso -b al,bm,cb,fs,ht,pm,ts -t de

-- 
CYa,
  Mario