[BRLTTY] Support for HumanWare brailliant BI series

[Mario Lang]

"S. Massy" <lists at wolfdream.ca> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 06:39:38PM -0400, Dave Mielke wrote:
>> [quoted lines by S. Massy on 2014/10/21 at 17:45 -0400]
>> 
>> >Am I correct in assuming support for this line of devices is only
>> >present in BRLTTY 5.0. I seem to be having no luck plug-and-playing with
>> >systems currently utilising version 4.4. Let me know if I'm missing
>> >something.
>> 
>> Those devices need the HumanWare (hw) driver, which was introduced in 4.4, so, 
>> in theory, it ought to work in 4.5. If you could post a log of whatever problem 
>> you're having in 4.5, we'll have a look at it.
> This is version 4.4 I'm trying to use on a few systems running Debian
> Wheezy. When you say "introduced in 4.4", should the driver work out of
> the box in this version?

As a HumanWare B80 user, I remember having had problems with past
versions of BRLTTY.  I *strongly* recommend upgrading
your version of BRLTTY, and not trying overly long to get the old
version of BRLTTY running with the BI.  Note that it should work in principle,
but might happen to swappow input keys at random.  This was fixed somewhere
before 5.0 if I remember correctly.

Additionally, I still seem to have issues initializing the B80 the
first time I boot my Linux host.  It can take me a few minutes, and
roughly 15 retries, until it finally works.  Reconnect also happens to
fail most of the time, so I defined a keyboard key combination to invoke
RESTARTBRL.  This works reliably after the frirst init of the device.
But as mention, the first init can really take long to work.  If anyone
has found any useful trick to make the B(I) more reliable on Linux,
please let me know.  It is a rather cool piece of hardware otherwise, I
really wish we(I) could finally nail this instability.

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕