[BRLTTY] Absolute basics

[Andy Jack]

I hope this list will be able to point me towards some documentation that I can understand. I'm a sighted person experimenting with Braille terminal and Linux in the hope of providing a blind friend with some better connectivity than his existing BrailleNote mPower.

I've a little Asus netbook with Ubuntu 10.04, a BrailleNote PK and a USB to serial adapter. The Ubuntu came with brltty 4.1 and orca but I've had no success in getting any sense out of them. I downloaded and built brltty 4.2 with --with-braille-driver=bn and --with-braille-device=ttyUSB0 (make install didn't seem to update the brltty in /sbin) and run it with sudo ./brltty in the Programs directory, the BrailleNote displays the BRLTTY 4.2 .. message and then says "Screen not in text"

I have tried running Orca and get speech out of it but have no clue how to connect it to the braille output. 

I would be happy for now if I could have a direct link to a terminal session which allows me to log in and use command line i/o from the Braillenote.

I've spent a week looking through the forest of documentation online and not found any simple answers.

Grateful for any pointers.

Regards,
Andy Jack