[BRLTTY] BRLTTY in GRUB

[J. R. Westmoreland]

I didn't know Grub supported serial devices. If not, why not just have a way to specifythe default to be usb.
Unless the device is fairly old it doesn't any longer have support for serial interfacing.
For example, I have three devices, a PM40(usb), a Handy Tech EBR40(usb or Bluetooth), and a FS Focus80(usb). I'm trying to recall if the rehab agency here has any devices that are only serial left.

J. R.



-----Original Message-----
From: brltty-bounces at mielke.cc [mailto:brltty-bounces at mielke.cc] On Behalf Of Dave Mielke
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 1:26 PM
To: Informal discussion between users and developers of BRLTTY.
Subject: Re: [BRLTTY] BRLTTY in GRUB

[quoted lines by Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko on 2012/03/15 at 20:10 +0100]

>Currently with a pointer to a structure. 

Has there been no need yet to identify a USB device in, say, grub.conf?

>Using serial number in finding is good,

Specifying the serial number is optional. Most users don't specify it. The normal case is that each driver knows which vendour/product ids it supports.

I've considered adding a more direct way, like specifying the bus number and device address, but such identifiers really aren't user friendly, which is why it hasn't been done (yet). Remember that a braille user can't see his screen in order to inspect the system before his braille deivce is up and running, so it's kind of impossible for him to figure out that kind of dynamic device identification ahead of time. There's a similar problem with the way Linux creates ttyUSBn devices, whcih is one reason we added direct USB support.

>just I'd like to prefix it with usb/ to avoid any collistion with serial. 

There's no collisiion from a brltty perspective. If the user specifies usb: 
then the device identifier is interpreted in a strictly USB context. The same is true for serial:. What may be confusing is that serial: is still optional (for backward compatibility) since only serial devices used to be supported. 
Giving just a device name (or path), therefore, is always interpreted as if
serial: were specified. If the user wants USB, he must specify usb:.

For example: If a user has a braille device which supports USB through a serial adapter, then he could say serial:ttyUSBn (brltty will use serial I/O through the virtual serial device), or he could say usb: (brltty will use direct USB operations).

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Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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