History

Aldo speaking :

In December 1999, I went to a local Linux club (here in Brussels, Belgium, Europe), they were organizing a Linux Install Party: they helped me to install a Debian (who is since then my standard and preferred distribution).

But the frustration of not having been able to install a distrib without external help turned me into thinking about finding any solution

1. to resolve this problem of autonomy,
2. to have a distrib-project for newbies/not Linux users who generally prefer first to try, before switching definitely to another system...

Of course for them my project should be an "easy to setup thing", or it should not be started !!!

I saw that Matthew Campbell had built a mini distrib, based on ZipSlack, -integrating speech support (SpeakUp)-, but no braille support was provided. I decided to experiment with some mini distribs; I tried Trinux, DragonLinux, the original ZipSlack ....... and finally ZipSpeak.

You also need to know that I was able to do such experiments due to the fact that I was using a hardware braille display: these types of "old" displays doesn't require BrlTty.

One of the problems Seba (our List Maintainer) encountered, concerning the UMSDOS format, doesn't sound so new to me: I tried to edit files of "BrlSpeak" from outside, in fact from within my Debian platform; the result was that each time I ran "BrlSpeak" I discovered that filenames such as rc_keyma.{_b were renamed to rc_keyma.$00 ... .$01, .$02, etcetera, you see what I mean...

When I decided to import and edit all new material from within a running "BrlSpeak", I observed that the correct names (8+3) were keeped unchanged.

I also discovered that the famous -linux-.-- file is automatically generated when you make a mkdir from inside Brlspeak.

This was my start-point. I had the right distrib, and if I was now able to add things without a stupid filename problem as consequence, then I should be able to work on a "braille interface" (My Major Objective).

My next step was to drop the BrlTty pack on BrlSpeak's /root and to try to compile a driver; it worked!

Now the last, biggest problem, was to find a good method to invert the problem of the chicken and the egg, understand: "to be able to create a method so that blind users should be able to preconfigure the brltty Makefile under DOS, while they see what they are doing on that moment": I simply created a cfg.bat preconfigurer (batch), it interacts with a CR-LF corrector and drops files into the appropriate \linux\ directory/subdirectory, from within the DOS prompt.

The final touch for me was to implement it so that the compilation of brltty should start only if necessary: I used the rc.local that comes with a Slackware distrib to execute the autocompile-script, and so provide immediately braille output at boot time.