[BRLTTY] Intro and a question

[Ben van Poppel]

Hello List.

I've been a Brltty user on and off for over 20 years. Like many, I tend to subscribe to mailing lists when I have questions or problems, so it's to the great credit to the Brltty developers past and present that this is my first appearance. The thing just seems to work and is unkillable! So firstly, thank you to you all for such a robust and dependable refreshable Braille solution. For years now my go-to "Braille Box) has been a Raspberry Pi with whatever Braille display is working at the moment hanging off it. A sort of refuge from constant synthetic speech chatter where I can still get useful and interesting things done. Just recently I've been trying to get Brltty working on the Mac as well however, which is where the first difficulty I've had comes in.

Soooo ... I'm using a 2018 MacBook with the current Big Sur. Brltty builds from a git clone without a hitch. The Screen patch comes across fine. The only strangeness when building Screen itself is that configure fails with Clang and the build fails with duplicate symbols with standard GCC. But it seems to build and run fine. Both are installed off /usr/local. Brltty comes up fine and responds normally when I use the Mac Keyboard. If I press anything on my Focus 40 Blue that isn't a panning button however, I get a warning ding and the message "Screen is initializing..." on the display. Pressing any key on the Mac keyboard banishes the message and normal operation resumes until I press another display control.

Be very grateful for any pointers as to what's happening. I don't know a great deal about screen as I've only really used it sporadically, and have never really had to troubleshoot Brltty itself. As I say, it just works!

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Cheers.
Ben