[BRLTTY] Alva and Bluetooth

[Tami Kinney]

Thanks. This is helpful. I finally made the breakthrough and am reading 
on my PM, having figured out how to navigate sanely on it. Whew!

I'm bumming about the Alva, which is much more ergonomic and has all 
those buttons and stuff. However, I'm glad I found out about the 
problems with the firmware and Linux BRLTTY before I spent a ton of 
money on it. Hm... Well, I can shop around more as time goes by. But I 
have my trusy PM to read on, so that's what counts.

Thanks again to all for answering my questions!

Tami

On 03/06/2012 01:34 AM, Lee Maschmeyer wrote:
> Hi all, especially Tami,
>
> Having been gone a couple days and missed some posts on Tami's thread
> I thought it would be easier to start a new one than try to untangle
> the other.
>
> First of all, you can't downgrade Alva firmware using Linux. It
> requires a Windows machine and is unreliable even there. I had my
> BC640 downgraded by the vendor. It works as a display but I can't use
> the internal disk; any time I try to store something on it the machine
> crashes. So don't do it even if you can. :-)
>
> However, Bluetooth should work. If your laptop doesn't have built-in
> Bluetooth you should be able to get a dongle (a dongle is included
> with a new Alva but I don't know if yours has one). There's at least
> one Ubuntu user with Bluetooth experience on this list. There's a file
> in the Documents subdirectory if you use the development version of
> brltty that should be pretty accurate in telling how to set it up.
>
> I've never used an 80-character display but I think they're less than
> optimal especially now that screens are no longer 80 characters wide
> in most cases. And the PM display works great with brltty; I used mine
> for more than five years. If you have a PAC Mate, detach the display
> from it and use the USB plug on the side of the display. Ignore the
> wheels except for large movements of multiple lines.
>
> HTH,
>