Loada Misc Stuff & Ramblings

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi Sabahattin and all.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 07:00:53AM +0100, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
> First, I wonder, should we have a domain to our name?  I have recently 
> found cause to open all projects under my hat which spark particular 
> interest, and I think this is one of them, by designating them as official 
> works of time spent in better ways <grin> EG by completing my degree and 
> therefore by giving them domains.  You can always get a list of these from 
> www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com.  I reckon this is a candidate for a domain, 
> and like the others I would be happy to write a simple set of web pages 
> introducing us to the world.  (Note I am a Gopher advocate - I would 
> prefer it if noone here objects.)
> 

I have thought about that as well. On one hand, we really don't have anything to show yet, just the fact that we got a kernel to run on the machine through the serial port.
Also, PDI has made it pretty clear that they wouldn't welcome our little group with open arms. I'm worried they might try to take legal measures before we really got going if we made ourselves more public now.

On the other hand, a domain name might draw more people with the skills we need to our cause.
Also, as I have stated here earlier, if anyone wants to write a couple of pages about us, I'd be more then happy to post them on www.romuald.net.eu.org.


> Secondly, I have finally extracted all text strings from PDI's Keynote SA 
> SSIL driver.  I regret that finding the ranges for certain values will be 
> quite difficult.  The driver was written in C, and debugless optimised.  I 
> am however putting a good deal of effort into extracting as much as I can 
> in the way of values from wherever else the information may show up.  Note 
> that this is not simply checking screen readers and their drivers - many 
> restrict the ranges in use.  For a first test, I could use some help.  The 
> syntax for changing the rate of the synthesiser is: [rn] where n is a 
> decimal value estimated to have a range of -100 to 200 (-100 = fastest).  
> A commonly used range appears to be -90 to 180, however.  Can someone with 
> timing better than I please tell me what they think the true range is - EG 
> does 200 appear slower than 180, or -100 appear faster than -90?  As each 
> test succeeds I will note the results and publish the final paper, with 
> your reading and consent.  Whether it helps the LinuxOnBN project is a 
> different matter because we have reason to believe that the synthesiser is 
> done in sound hardware; nevertheless, it could be useful to someone, 
> especially the authors of speaking screen readers (including BrlTTY).
> 

Sorry, I can't help there.

> Now, about the braille display and external vs internal use of it, and the 
> issue of getting the info from PDI.  The only info I've seen on PDI's 
> offering help about the display (a logical move since the display is 
> produced by Humanware) was a message forwarded by Greg here from PDI to 
> Blinux, stating the virtues and added marketting hipe of their utter 
> delight of supporting Linux, etc, etc, etc.  In short, we know nothing 
> about exactly how the BrlTTY team got the information they did, unless 
> someone goes back and reviews the thread and finds more.  We would have to 
> ask them.  Any volunteers?
> 

I was thinking of looking through the braille tty code, to see if there are any comments there particular to the bn.
If that fails, I was thinking of e-mailing Dave Mielke, and asking him if PDI came to them, or if they went to PDI.
If they went to PDI, then we've got a chance.
If anyone has a better and more specific idea on who to contact, and/or what questions to ask, please feel free to mention it.

Also, not all of us here are programmers and computer science students in university. However, if someone here has good correspondence skills, this is an area where you could help the project.

> Greg, could you tell us if your kernel image accepts keyboard input with a 
> braille keyboard (in American code)?  If you can tap out in braille a 
> command and get it to execute, clearly the keyboard works in hardware.  Of 
> course, if you have a qwerty you cannot conduct this experiment.  If this 
> were true, we automagically vanquish the hefty keyboard handling 
> requirements.  I fear that it is not, though.
> 

Well, I was running it through a serial terminal, something like passing a port and baud rate in lilo on the pc. In that case, the keyboard driver gets disabled, and the serial port is used for all i/o, this is what happened here as well. The dmesg output even mentioned that the keyboard driver was being disabled, and the serial port was being used.
Even so, I did tap out some stuff on the keyboard, but nothing happened. 
As soon as I can connect to ftp://linux-vr.sourceforge.net and get the development tools (the ftp site seems to be down since yesterday afternoon), I'll be building my own kernel.
However, if I don't use the serial port, I still won't be able to tell if the keyboard works or not, because I won't have any sort of output, unless, hmmm, I wonder what would happen if I tried patching speakup into that kernel?

> How did you get the BN to start the kernel at all?  Is it all there on the 
> site mentioned?
> 

Yes, it's all on the site.
I downloaded the ce linux boot loader, and the kernel/ramdisk image.
Then, I downloaded it all to a linux folder on my cf card, edited the boot loader's config file, stuck the card into the bn, went to utilities, and run application.

Greg