brltty and ipcop

[Attila Konietzka]

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Hello,
I just bought an small via epia board which i want to utilize as firewall
together with 2 other NiCs in an small travla case by using the
ipcop-Software (special linux-distribution). I must for the ipcop to be
installed change the instroot.gz image on the iso and rebuild it so that the
statically linked brltty which i chosed for my device is also contained in
the iso.
Here is some suggestions from the developers of the ipcop-devel mailinglist
at sourceforge which i stricktly followed.

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What i suggest :
mount the iso somewhere (/tmp/iso/)
create a directory for example in /tmp/ipcop-brltty/
copy the entire iso in this directory : cp -a /tmp/iso/* /tmp/ipcop-brltty/
Cd in /tmp/ipcop-brltty/boot/isolinux/ and gunzip instroot.gz.
Then mount instroot somewhere : mount -o loop instroot /tmp/instroot .
Instroot has 986ko free space, I hope it is enough to put brltty static
binary.
Put brltty in  bin/ (in my example) /tmp/instroot/bin/ .
Then move bin/install to bin/install2 .
Create a little bash-script with the name bin/install :

#!/bin/ash
/bin/brltty -d device -b driver -c table
/bin/install2 /dev/tty2

Then umount /tmp/instroot/
gzip /tmp/ipcop-brltty/boot/isolinux/instroot
Recreate the iso with mkisofs. This sould work :
cd /tmp/ipcop-brltty/
mkisofs -o ../ipcop-brltty.iso -b boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c
boot/isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table .

burn ipcop-brltty.iso and try !
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The only difference in the /bin/install script i made were, that for the
statically linked brltty i left out the -b -d and -c options.
So when i went after what the developer said, i had an iso with a little
bigger instroot.gz in its boot/isolinux directory because in the filesystem
of the instroot i put the brltty in the /bin directory.
But unfortunately after burning and booting the iso nothing appeared on my
braille-device, and when i got some sighted assistance i found out that the
screen-output of the brltty is rather usual, regarding the driver being
loaded and that there is no speech-support available, so the screen-output
didn't give me any errors, but still there was no braille available under my
fingers.

I am sure that i have connected the device to the right serial port since
knoppix works great with the appropriate knoppix-cheatcodes.txt file on my
boot-floppy.
Also as i had mounted the file-system of instroot i searched for /dev/ttyS0
and /dev/vcsa and both of them i could find using the ls-command, and also
the kernel does include the (CONFIG_SERIAL=y) option.
I must add, relying on the infos of the developers, that in this context
some inodes where not created when building the kernel and instroot
filesystem, and that the ipcop 1.4 release is an lfs-based one.
I also thought of hacking the boot-floppies and since brltty doesn't fit on
the 1st disk even in it's smallest static size available i thought of
hacking the boot-floppy to require another from where it can load it's
brltty, just to keep the waste of empty cds in it's limit.
Can anyone help me please to track this problem down, since i just
successfully installed debian using static brlttys and had no problems at
all to get this working?
Any help is appreciated, and if you want me to include more correspondence
from the developers with me, just tell me.
Thanks and best Regards, Attila.

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