Bug 28811

Summary:	brltty is not properly installed in the installer, hence blind people can't use it
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Johnny A. Solbu <cooker>
Component:	Installer	Assignee:	Mageia tools maintainers <mageiatools>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	ouaurelien
Version:	Cauldron
Target Milestone:	Mageia 9
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
See Also:	https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28813
Whiteboard:	MGA7TOO MGA8TOO
Source RPM:	brltty-6.3-3.mga9.src.rpm, drakx-installer-images-2.83-32.mga9.src.rpm	CVE:
Status comment:

Description Johnny A. Solbu 2021-04-20 00:34:04 CEST

A friend of mine is blind and wants to install Mageia 8, he is currently using Debian.
In order to see he use a braille device, which uses brltty to communicate with the braille.

According to our documentation one just needs to add the kernel parameter «brltty» in order to activate brltty on the installer.
That's the theory, but it doesn't work, as documented.
He says when he use the grub options «brltty=foo-bar» he gets «weird characters» in the braille, and can't read any of it. It's just garble.


I managed to figure out which steps he need to use on the DVD installer in order to get to the command line at the first setup screen (selecting language) in stage2.
Once in TTY2 in stage2 he can manually start brltty. That does not help either.
When I tried to start brltty, it complained on not finding /etc/brltty.conf, but it started.

I suspect that brltty is not installed correctly on the installer images we use.

So how do we track down why it's not working?

Comment 1 Aurelien Oudelet 2021-04-20 09:52:05 CEST

Assigning.

Whiteboard: (none) => MGA7TOO MGA8TOO
Source RPM: (none) => brltty-6.3-3.mga9.src.rpm, drakx-installer-images-2.83-32.mga9.src.rpm
Target Milestone: --- => Mageia 9
CC: (none) => ouaurelien
Assignee: bugsquad => mageiatools

Comment 2 Johnny A. Solbu 2021-04-20 11:41:27 CEST

Just for testing purposes I got my friend to test an old Mandriva 2010.2 ISO he still had laying around on his drive, to see if the brltty installer worked when Mandriwa was still around, since our installer and system is prety much the same as back then. My thinking was to then test every Mageia release in order to figure out which Mageia release broke it.
And I tested mdv2010.2 in a VM, to see how he could activate brltty. Fortunately only the boot loader was different.

The only visible difference was that the Mandriva installer printed that it could not load /lib/brltty/libbrlttyxl.so every 5 seconds, along with 2 other lines which makes the text installer unusable. This seems to have been fixed somewhere on the journey since they don't show up in Mageia.


So I think I can confidently say that the brltty support in our installer has in fact never worked.

But now we have a braille user who is willing to do some testing if the end result is that it works. :-)

Johnny A. Solbu 2021-04-20 12:13:20 CEST

See Also: (none) => https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28813