[BRLTTY] BrlAPI & qemu, focus problem

[Elias Oltmanns]

(2013-11-22) Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> 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?

This is the qemu-kvm package from Ubuntu 12.04 recompiled with teh
following options:

$ ./configure --target-list="x86_64-softmmu i386-softmmu x86_64-linux-user i386-linux-user arm-softmmu" \
     --prefix=/usr --interp-prefix=/etc/qemu-binfmt/%M \
     --disable-blobs --disable-strip --sysconfdir=/etc --enable-mixemu \
     --enable-vnc-thread --enable-rbd --audio-drv-list="pa,alsa,sdl,oss" \
     --enable-vnc-sasl --enable-docs

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

I-m not sure what you mean.

$ apt-cache search qemu gtk
qemu-launcher - GTK+-Oberfläche für den Computer-Emulator QEMU
qemulator - Eine Lösung zur einfachen Einrichtung und Verwaltung von Qemu
$ dpkg -l | grep qemu
ii  qemu-common 1.0+noroms-0ubuntu14.3-1elias1                      qemu common functionality (bios, documentation, etc)
ii  qemu-kvm    1.0+noroms-0ubuntu14.3-1elias1                      Full virtualization on i386 and amd64 hardware
ii  qemu-utils  1.0+noroms-0ubuntu14.3-1elias1                      qemu utilities
$

So, can we assume that this is not the issue?

> 
> - 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.

Well, adding the usb device after startup does, indeed, solve the focus
issue. Unfortunately, brltty (inside the vm) is now emitting messages
like

brltty.exe: Ignored Byte: 00

with every key press on the physical braille terminal. Also, I'm still
not quite comfortable with the usb implementation of the braille device
and would like to be able to use the serial one.

Is there anything else I can do or test?

Thanks for your help,

Elias