[BRLTTY] Does the rhmkiso script work for anyone at all?

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Mario Lang on 2006/03/07 at 11:24 +0100]

>I just tried to use the rhmkiso script to create a BRLTTY
>enabled fedora CD and failed completely.  Does this actually
>work for anyone?

Yes, it does work for me. :-)

It's of course possible that it doesn't work on a non-Fedora system.

>The FC4 boot.iso uses the "newc" cpio format, rhmkiso
>forces the oldc format.

I doubt this is a problem because it's just been confirmed recently on this
list that the FC4 installer image on BRLTTY's web site does work. That being
said, if the script should be fixed in some way then that's what'll be done. 
Which line(s) should be changed, and how?

>When using the 3.7.2 tarball and the 3.7.2 version of rhmkiso,
>this, and the fact that the ramdisk size seems too small
>prevent the resulting cd from booting, we get a kernel panic, unable
>to mount root fs.  

This would need further investigation. The installer images on BRLTTY's web
site do work. The big difference probably is that they were made on an FC
system wehreas you're probably trying to make them on a non-FC system. Perhaps
the cause of the problem is in the following warning which I get when I run
rhmkiso:

   sys_linux.o(.text+0x18f): In function `loadSharedObject':
   ./sys_shlib_dlfcn.h:27: warning: Using 'dlopen' in statically linked 
   applications requires at runtime the shared libraries from the glibc version 
   used for linking

This implies that certain shared libraries are still used even if a static
executable is being built. Since (I suspect) you're using a non-FC system, the
potential for such a run-time conflict is, of course, greater.

Perhaps a few magic gcc options should be added to force the build to link
againstg the shared objects on the boot disk itself (if tghere are any).

>I hacked around this, only to
>get to the point where brltty works, but /dev/ttyS0 does not exist.

That's very strange since it does exist in the FC-supplied image and isn't
removed by rhmkiso.

>So much about the released tarball.  I then tried the
>latest rhmkiso script from SVN.  But that one unfortunately
>has a hard-dependancy on the fedora MAKEDEV script.  For instance,
>the Debian MAKEDEV script does not understand -d and -D args.

That'd be my fault. The former version used to copy the devices from the host
system, but, of course, that method didn't work right if they weren't there. Do
you think I should hard-code the major and minor device numbers and just create
them by brute force?

>So at is seems, 3.7.2 scriptage fails, and the svn scriptage is
>now distributiion dependant.

As always, I'm open to suggestions.

For the time being, though, you could always download the braillified installer
images from BRLTTY's web site.

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Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | I believe that the Bible is the
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