[BRLTTY] BRLTTY on a RaspBerry Pi 5 with RaspBerry Pi OS

[Tim Böttcher]

Hi,

recently joined the list, so a brief intro: I'm Tim, legally deafblind, study applied math and computer science. I work part-time as a software developer and  sysadmin.

I recently got a RaspBerry Pi 5  and installed RaspBerry Pi OS on it. BRLTTY 6.5 is already preinstalled on it. That's not the most recent version of it, mind. I also noted that it says it won't sbustitute emoji--haven't been able to track down why just yet; emoji show up as question marks.

I then also installed MATE desktop and Orca, set up headless mode for the Pi (i.e., I'm pretending there's a screen attached) and it worked fairly well, all in all. My only gripe was that my Braille display--an Activator by HelpTech--wouldn't connect to the Pi via bluetooth. USB, no problem, but bluetooth--nope. No matter what I tried. Also got confirmation from the manufacturer that they can reproduce this problem; they think it's caused by the BlueZ stack. Has anyone found a workaround for this issue?

I also tried upgrading BRLTTY to the latest version (6.7) to see if that helps in any way. Since Debian-based distros don't get the most recent BRLTTY version, it seems, I tried to install from source, as root. That seemed to work fine, too, although I got two errors during the compilation of the Python API; neither is something I could easily track down to its source, though--and it didn't seem to be too relevant.

The one thing I noticed was that installing the systemd service didn't work. No idea why, really--the files mentioned in the reference section on BRLTTY are all there, but running sudo brltty -I yields the output that the feature is unavailable and there's no brltty.service file anywhere, even after sudo systemctl daemon-reload and reboot.

Since the udev rules are in place, BRLTTY still activates fine, but when I launch the GUI, I always get the output "no screen" or occasionally "screen not in text mode" or "console not in use", depending on the situation; brltty.conf also doesn't get generated in /etc/.

I tried downgrading back to bRLTTY 6.5, but I can't seem to get the GUI working with BRLTTY consistently anymore. It worked for a spell, but after a reboot it stopped working and started only showing "no screen". Since I didn't change anything major before the reboot I'm kind of at a loss why. 

I'd appreciate any tips, pointers or requests for further info.

Thanks in advance,
Tim