First of all, for some reason the gentoo package has been done with /usr/bin as the path to the executable; in the author's package it is installed in /bin and this is where it should be so that it can be installed early. In addition, the default installation of brltty according to gentoo apparently configures with gpm. This again is not the author's default; I'm sure there must have been some reason for this decision but I believe gpm should be a decision the user should make rather than the default. Of course, the gpm inclusion can be avoided once one knows this is going to happen with the default.
In both debian and FC, I was able to do a line early in my /etc/inittab:
brl::sysinit:/bin/brltty
Even if I use a package for brltty that does install in /bin, this line fails to work for me. I get complaints about being unable to read the screen and /dev/vcsa: no such file or directory. Since brltty is equipped to look for other alternatives, such as /dev/vcsa0 1 2 etc. and /dev/vcc/ one shouldn't need to create /dev/vcsa but even if one does so, one gets the same complaint. I also notice that the permissions in brltty for the /dev/vcsa device are supposed to be 660, while they actually appear to be 600 for the /dev/vcc directory on my gentoo system. But even changing these doesn't help. I have to assume that maybe the devfs filesystem isn't mounted yet and thus the file can't be found, but I've tried the brl:: line both before and after the
si:sysinit::/bin/rc sysinit
and it doesn't work in either case. If it's put too far down in inittab it can cause more brlttys to be respawned; as I recall it did this even when I used the --no-daemon option, but i only tried this once so I'd have to retry to confirm this result. At any rate, putting it further down in /etc/inittab or putting it in as an init.d script defeats the purpose of having it start early enough.
I guess this also brings up the question of why the gentoo instructions want the kernel configured with devfs, even though it says "obsolete" right in the kernel config. I've been assuming there was a reason and so have done it, but I wonder if this is contributing to my problem with starting brltty at boot.
If anybody can help me solve this problem I'd really appreciate it; right now I'm also running speakup so I at least have something starting to tell me what's going on at boot. But my preference is to use brltty primarily and only use speakup as a backup. I am, however, very pleased to see speakup included by Gentoo and hope that support will continue. Still, I would like to be able to use brltty to its full extent.
Thanks.
-- Cheryl
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
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