[BRLTTY] Got braille working on Leopard but not by compiling

[Cheryl Homiak]

I still have not found a way to get stropts.h on my system; I googled and 
found other people missing it but no solution. the strange thing is I 
haven't found it on my Tiger system either, but screen compiles on my 
tiger installation. The issue comes up in pty.c.

At any rate, I was finally able to run brltty by copying the 
already-compiled binary from my bootable Tiger installation, which I have 
on an external drive. I hd tried this earlier and it had failed, but the 
reason for this was that in my Leopard installation, although Keyspan 
Assistant was imported, the driver wasn't loading. When I reinstalled the 
Keyspan driver, there were then two Keyspan designations but one didn't 
work and I had that one designated in /etc/brltty.conf. When I fixed that 
problem, brltty worked.

Btw I suggest that anybody compiling brltty on the Mac put in in a 
location other than the standard one. Put it in your home directory or 
/opt. Otherwise, if you have to do an archive and install to reinstall or 
if you upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5, your brltty will be wiped out. You might 
also consider having screen in a location other than /usr/bin.

>From what I hear, braille in leopard is working pretty nicely, though I 
still don't know what it's functionality is compared to brltty; will have 
to ask on one of the Mac lists about that. The supported displays are:

Alva 544 Satellite
Alva 544 Satellite Traveller
Alva 570 Satellite Pro
alva 584 Satellite Pro
baum pocket vario 24
baum super vario 32
baum superVario 40
baum superVario 64
baum superVario 80
baum VarioConnect 24baum varioConnect 32
baum VarioConnect 40
Humanware brailleConnect 24
Human brailleConnect 32
Humanware brailleConnect 40
humanware brailliant 64Humanware brailliant 80
Freedom Scientific focus 40
freedom scientific focus 80
freedom scientific pac mate 20
freedom scientific pac mate 40

Quite a few displays from four manufacturers but not helpful to those of 
us with other equipment. I am very thankful for the ability of brltty to 
support so many different displays, and I'm very glad I can at least use 
it in the terminal on the Mac.


  -- 
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."