[BRLTTY] Newbie questions to help me make a Slint installer blind friendly.

[Didier Spaier]

Hi all.

Job done ;)

Thanks all for your help and your friendly attitude with newbies,
and a special thanks to Phippe Delavalade for is help in testing.

The new Slint hybrid ISO images of the installers for Slackware
version 14.1 (including all the genuine Slackware packages) are here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/slint/files/14.1/

Feel free to try them (preferably the 32-bit version, as explained later)
and give me a feedback.

Here is the greeting screen of the 32 bit version:

--- screen begins on next line
Welcome to the Slint installer for Slackware-14.1 (32-bit x86 edition)!

Here are the available languages for installation:
04 Dutch            11 Polish                  19 Swedish
05 English (USA)    12 Portuguese (Brazil)     20 Turkish
06 French           13 Portuguese (Portugal)   21 Ukrainian
07 German           15 Russian
08 Greek            17 Spanish (Latin America)

Please type the language code at the prompt below, then press [Enter].
Alternatively, wait 2 minutes or just press [Enter] for English (USA)

Append 'u' for non-SMP kernel (CPU<Pentium III), 'n' for 'nomodeset' in
case of black screen after booting. Examples:
    boot: 06 | boot: 04n | boot: 06u | boot: 04nu

You can pass extra parameters to the kernel after the language code.

This installer also allows you to boot an already installed system.

To know more about that and other features, press [F2]
--- screen ended on previous line

As usual a commmnd line would be e.g.
06n brltty=pm,usb:,fr_FR

The n for 'nomodeset' helps get  a 8x25 terminal.

No issue with the dialog program: I just had to use the '--visit-items'
option for dialog boxes that contain a menu or a check-list so that the
cursor can be in front of the (highlighted for sighted people) item.

The settings in the command line are propagated in the installed system
in /etc/brltty.conf, thanks to bp2cf. The installer installs a brltty
package with the udev rules and a file /etc/rc.d/rc.brltty to manage the
daemon.

I have three remaining questions though -- maybe your answers will lead to
more, ut you are used to that with me ;)

1. For me and for Philippe the "nomodeset" kernel parameter allows to
    display a 80x25 screen on our physical machines, but on a VMware Player
    virtual machine that doesn't work. Any hint to make sure we get 80x25
    on _any_ machine?

2. In case of UEFI firmware (and only for the 64-bit installers), instead
    of SYSLINUX GRUB is used as a boot loader.
    But then the command line has to be edited, not typed to include the
    'brltty=... part', thus I assume that a blind erson should be assisted
    by a sighting person for that very first task. Do you know a way to
    avoid that using GRUB? For your information I attach to this message
    the grub.cfg file as it is now in Slint64-1.1
3. Now that a (third party) installer for Slackware version 14.1 shipping
    brltty is available, how can I spread the word among potential users?


Cheers,
Didier
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