[BRLTTY] BrlAPI & qemu, focus problem

[Samuel Thibault]

Elias Oltmanns, le Fri 22 Nov 2013 14:30:49 +0100, a écrit :
> However, once I switch away from qemu
> back to the terminal window where qemu has been launched, the physical
> braille terminal suddenly starts reacting to the brltty process inside
> the VM and I can, strangely enough, navigate the terminal window inside
> the VM rather than the terminal window of the host system which, to all
> intents and purposes, is the focused one as it receives all keyboard
> input and is presented by Orca (speech output).

Yes, that is not so surprising: qemu is actually running in the
terminal.  Where it is surprising is that qemu is supposed to tell
brlapi itself that the window where all this should happen is the
graphical window.  There can be three reasons why it is not happening:

- qemu is miscompiled and the braille driver did not get that part of
the code compiled.  Did you build qemu yourself?  Which distribution are
you using?

- you are using the GTK qemu interface, for which the code above hasn't
been implemented yet.

- the virtual braille device gets initialized before the graphical
window is opened.  It seems that has been done at some point and I
didn't notice.  One way to circumvent that it is to add the usb device
after VM startup.  Unfortunately that requires typing usb_add braille in
the qemu console, which is tricky: you have to pass -usbdevice mouse at
the command prompt in order to get the USB bus initialized, and after
qemu is started, press control-alt-2 to get to the qemu console, type
usb_add braille, and press control-alt-1 to get back to the VM.

I'll have a look at fixing the 4th issue, but I don't know when.

Samuel