[Debian-eeepc-devel] Brltty and the custom installer for the Eee

[Glenn Saberton]

Hi Robin,
	Glad that worked! Your wireless certainly should have been detected,
unless your 900A has the realteck chipset which as yet don't support. It
is likely an atheros chip, and I think that the likely issue why it
wasn't detected was that it was disabled in the bios. This will cause
the installer not to see it at all, and therefore it wouldn't have
installed the modules for it either in the installed kernel. You can get
these modules by using apt-get or aptitude to fetch them. The package
for the atheros one is called "madwifi-modules-2.6-686" Installing the
desktop task is fine, but it does tend to cause a lot of things to get
installed, which can be an issue on some of the eee's with small hard
drives. We do have some tips on the wiki for keeping the drive cleaned
up from old packages and such though. Hope you enjoy debian on your eee!

Cheers

Glenn

Robin Kipp wrote:
> Hi again Glenn!
> I tested your image now (sorry, it took longer than I thought) and
> brltty works without any problems, that's really, really awesome!!!
> Thank you so much for that! It would be great if we could get that
> included in the official images, it doesn't take up a lot of space I
> think and I'm sure nobody would complain about it. I just have one big
> problem that I also had under Debian before: it doesn't recognise the
> WLAN chip at all... Is this a general issue, is WLAN not supported by
> the current version of Debian for the Eee? Also, when installing, the
> list of packages that should be downloaded from the Debian mirror showed
> up. Here, both "Desktop environment" and "Laptop" were unchecked, so I
> checked them. Was that correct?
> Robin
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Glenn Saberton"
> <gsaberton at foomagic.org>
> To: "Robin Kipp" <webmaster at robin-kipp.de>
> Cc: <debian-eeepc-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org>
> Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2008 4:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [Debian-eeepc-devel] Brltty and the custom installer for
> the Eee
> 
> 
>> Robin Kipp wrote:
>>> Hello list,
>>> A few months ago, I got an Asus Eee 900. This laptop comes pre-installed
>>> with Windows XP, which I really didn't want on there... :-) So, I wanted
>>> to install Debian Linux on it and was pleased to see that there's a
>>> version of Debian especially made for the Eee... I looked around on the
>>> wiki page and saw that there's actually no brltty (Braille terminal)
>>> included in the installer, which would allow me to use my Braille
>>> display that I'd have to use because I am completely blind. I tried the
>>> standard installer along with the installation / configuration stepps
>>> described on the wiki page, but I find this approach to be all but
>>> optimal, plus it doesn't recognise a whole lot of stuff. So I wanted to
>>> ask, is it possible for you developers to include brltty in the custom
>>> installer? Right now, the whole community of blind Eee users (which is
>>> quite big) can't use Linux, because no distribution that works with the
>>> Eee offers an accessible installation method. Couldn't Debian make a
>>> difference?
>>> Robin
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Debian-eeepc-devel mailing list
>>> Debian-eeepc-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
>>> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-eeepc-devel
>>
>> Hi Robin,
>> Without looking too far into it, I have made an image that includes
>> brltty-udeb. If you can give it a test run and report back how it goes,
>> we can go from there. No need to do a full install, just going through
>> the first menu or two will be sufficient to see if it works. As long as
>> you don't run the partitioner then nothing will get written to disk, so
>> you can play with any of the menus up to that point. If it fails to
>> work, I'll have to look a bit deeper into how brltty integrates into the
>> cd images. If you can help with testing in this regard until we get it
>> right, that would be great. Image can be found at
>> http://eeepc.debian.net/debian/images/brltty/debian-eeepc.img
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Glenn 
> 
>