Re: woody root.bin

[Mario Lang <mlang@teleweb.at>]

Boris DAIX <Boris.Daix@insa-lyon.fr> writes:

> Mario Lang <mlang@teleweb.at> writes:
>
>> Check ftp://ftp.tugraz.at/incoming/debian
>> for the files I just sent over to kajarii for first time
>> real-world testing.  I tested the procedure in theory
>> (without having a brailledisplay connect) and it worked.
>
> I would try it as soon as possible :-) I have two debian testing dists
> to install by yesterday... I wait for your erratum on url given.
OK, first I have to say, the version there (brltty.tar) does not
work. We forgot that we needed to link brltty statically.

>> The whole idea is that we load brltty via tar
>> from a disk directly.  The only modification
>> I made to root.bin is essentially editing /etc/init.d/rcS and 
>> inserting
>>
>> echo "Please insert BRLTTY disk and press ENTER"
>> read ret 1 </dev/console
>> cd /
>> tar xf /dev/fd0
>> /sbin/brltty
>
> Very, very interesting !
>
OK, here goes the story:

To build such a third brltty disk, simply create a directory
tree which looks like a root of a filesystem, something like

etc/brltty
etc
lib/brltty
sbin

Now, put all the brltty files you want/need there, there are actually
some ways to do it.  Either precompile the text.table and device
name and driver type into one static brltty, then you just need
sbin/brltty.

If you still want it to dynload different drivers, just do that,
but dont forget to compile brltty statically, and put a
etc/brltty.conf
in your dummy directory.

Now if everything is there, just tar that up:

tar c * >../brlttydisk.tar

You now write this tar directly to a normal floppy disk, either using
dd or cat, both work:
dd if=../brlttydisk.tar of=/dev/fd0
or
cat ../brlttydisk.tar >/dev/fd0

Now you just need the modified woody-root.bin from ftp://ftp.tugraz.at/incoming/debian.


>> So, read the file INSTALL in the ftp directory,
>> and try it.  Please tell me if that worked for you, and if
>> it is a useable solution at all.
>
> I'll do report when I'd have tried it. But how do you modify the
> root.bin ? 'cause I can't take over mounting it, and source package
> boot-floppies can't compile (libs needed conflict each other...) ?

Here the second story:

To modify root.bin, you need to unzip it:

mv root.bin root.bin.gz
gunzip root.bin.gz
mount root.bin /mnt -o loop

Now you are ready, only thing I did was to insert
the lines I posted into
etc/init.d/rcS

Just after proc gets mounted should be ok.

now, dont forget to umount and gzip again :)

cd /
umount /mnt
gzip root.bin



This is only a rough email to get the info across to interested people,
as soon as I find more time I will put that together in a readme and on
a web site.  The right time for the (hopefully soon) coming woody
release :-)

>
> Thank you a lot

-- 
CYa,
  Mario