Re: woody root.bin

[Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@chartermi.net>]

Ok, just made my own brlttydisk.tar and used the rescue disk for woody from the
debian ftp and the modified woody-root.bin. I don't want to reinstall at this
point, so I only went through the preliminaries. Brltty starts up fine; I have
no way of knowing if there are any errors but it seems to start up fine.
Some comments:
1. It would appear from the Bootdisks/README that comes with the source that you
do have to choose a driver when compiling statically. refer to this README for
further clarification of this. This would mean you couldn't have one brltty.tar
for everybody, but would need individual ones for the various drivers. Perhaps
this has changed, but again, I don't see any indication of this in the README.
Howwever on the todo list is the following:

-Figure out how to use shared libraries from a statically linked
   executable, when the lib references symbols from the main
   program. With that we could do generic bootdisk with dynamic selection
   of braille driver.

2. remember that if /dev/vcsa0 is not present in the root.bin, it must either be
included in the modified root.bin or in the brlttydisk. It wasn't clear whether
or not this had been put on to the modified root.bin or was already present
there so I added it to the
brlttydisk.

3. I did my tar command for the brlttydisk as follows:
tar cvpf brlttydisk.tar *
I think using the "f" and the filename is actually the proper way to use tar
rather than using a 'greater than" sign, though I imagine that works too.

4. It
isn't necessary to include a /lib/brltty directory or /etc/brltty.conf if you
include what you need in the compilation (see bootdisk/README. I don't know
whether this would change when static linking can be done with all drivers
compiled in.
5. If you want to copy a rudimentary brltty onto your new system until you can
install a full brltty on it, you can go into the other console and copy over the
necessary files onto the new system (target, I believe) and, if you want brltty
to come up when the new system boots, edit the desired file or add a brltty.sh
to /etc/init.d and make a symlink within /etc/rcS.d. Either way will work.

6. Don't forget that if you are going to do a woody install, you need a modified
root.bin, your brltty disk, and the debian rescue.bin and 4 driver.bins. Base
floppies are no longer needed.

7. I had one report from a person who tried to do a cold woody install and had
problems when it came time to install packages. However, I am hearing from the
debian lists that people are installing successfully, so I can't tell you what
is going on there.

8. Per the comment that was made re: the new installer system coming down the
pike where hacking bootdisks may not be of help, those of us involved in debian
might want to get some  fingers in that pie so that brltty users don't get
locked
out of being able to install debian with brltty in the future. It's too easy to
get left in the position of complaining after the fact about something that
might have been forseen and dealt with before the fact.

Cheryl