[BRLTTY] Getting Started, Questions About Use With BrailleNote

[Jared Wright]

Hello all, Firstly, introductions. My name's Jared Wright, and I'll be starting out my third year at Butler University in Indianapolis this fall. it will be my second year as a computer science major. While I have embraced technology wholeheartedly and enthusiastically for many years, 95% or so of my experience has thus far been within the Windows environment, and all of my information about Linux is secondhand. I do believe it's time to explore something new and potentially better though. Thus, my investigating Linux, and after getting some feedback on that, my investigating BRLTTY. I will confess to having actually used synthesized speech quite a bit more than Braille for my accessibility needs so far, but I figure I'm being open-minded and exploratory in this whole endeavor, and BRLTTY has come highly recommended as a solution for accessing the Linux/unix console. I will just say in advance that I come to you quite unfamiliar with working a unix-like OS, so be gentle at first if you can! *grin* I am, for all intents and purposes, a novice all over again.

Which leads nicely to my initial inquiry. I do have a BrailleNote MPower with a 32 cell display, and this will be my output device for using BRLTTY. My PC is a recently purchased laptop, an Asus F3JP to be specific, that does not have standard serial ports. And the BrailleNote when serving as a Braille display of course uses serial or bluetooth connectivity. I was wondering what information I could get about the possibility of using bluetooth to make the connection from BrailleNote to BRLTTY? It is my understanding that Debian's installation CD and the alternate text installation for Ubuntu have BRLTTY built in and that it can detect Braille displays through USB automatically to quickly get Braille output from the get-go. Is it practically feasible for me to run the display through bluetooth from the onset or even at all, keeping in mind how little I'm sure I really know about the entire OS? I also understand that it is possible to get BRLTTY on the respective installation CD's to find the BrailleNote if it's connected via a serial to USB adaptor, but that this requires a bit more tinkering. Any instructions you might be able to point me to for doing this would be greatly appreciated, since this is how I'd be installing my first distribution if Bluetooth is a no go.

My second inquiry involves hardware compatibility. The Linux laptop wiki tells me the graphics card (ATI Mobility Radeon X1700) is going to need either the open source Radeon driver or ATI's fglrx driver. Similarly, the integrated sound card is going to need the snd-hda-intel driver. Will BRLTTY be workable through installation of the distribution itself before I'm able to get these two respective drivers, and does it matter from BRLTTY's standpoint if the graphics/sound cards aren't running ideally at first?

Very much looking forward to getting up and running and starting to explore Linux and hoping I can make BRLTTY one of my primary tools in the toolbox for taking care of the accessibility part of things. Thanks very much in advance for whatever guidance you can provide. And feel free to put me back in line if I start applying my Windows knowledge where it's only going to make things unnecessarily complicated! I'm bound to do it a few times before all is said and done. Thanks again, and take care.


Jared Wright
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