[BRLTTY] Brltty woes on Centos 7

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Keith Wessel on 2017/02/28 at 08:26 -0600]

>While the version of brltty that Centos provides works, it lacks a couple
>things. 

And, if you're using a laptop on battery power, 4.5 is much less friendly to 
that battery than 5 is.

>First, I can't, for anything, get any sound out of it for alert
>tunes. After looking at its dependencies, I noticed it didn't have alsa libs
>listed. Could it be that the Centos-distributed version (brltty-4.5-13.el7)
>doesn't have any sound support other than the beeper device?

Do ldd on the brltty executable to see which libraries it's using.

>So, I tried the brltty-5.4 RPM available for download from brltty.com. I
>really wanted to move to Brltty V5, anyway. I run it at home on a Gentoo
>system, and I like a number of the changes including the new button mappings
>for my PowerBraille 80. Sadly, it's looking for, among other things, libicu
>4.9. Centos 7 comes with 5.0. Sigh.

Best, really, to build brltty for yourself. That way, you can specifically 
configure it for the system you have.

>Next stop, the source RPM. Try to build my own. I attempt to add the many
>dependencies required to build the RPM: 23 that I didn't yet have. However,
>one can't be met: gcc-java. It's not available in RHEL and Centos 7 that I
>can see.

You can configure with --disable-java-bindings. That shouldn't cause any 
problems. Again, though, doing that may require a non-RPM build. Get the 
tarball - not the rpm - and build from that.

>Can anyone point me to a binary RPM of Brltty for Centos 7 that has ALSA
>support for PCM alert tunes? Or perhaps the Centos one does and I'm just not
>configuring something right? I tried many times this week to make it work.

I myself am not familiar with CentOS 7. Maybe someone else on this list is.

>Alternatively, can anyone make suggestions for building the srpm? What
>changes might I need to make to the configure command-line to not need
>gcc-java, 

As mentioned above: Build from the tarball, and configure with 
--disable-java-bindings.

>and would might I lose if I left that out? 

Only the functinality of anything that relies on the Java bindings for BrlAPI. 
I don't think there are any major public apps that do.

>Would that hurt any of the Gnome/Orca brlapi integration?

No. They use the Python bindings.

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Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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