Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 03:34:07 +0900 From: Masafumi NAKANE/=?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCQ2Y6LDJtSjgbKEI=?= <max@wide.ad.jp> To: mike@smith.net.au Cc: max@wide.ad.jp Subject: Re: question Message-ID: <19980828033407Q.masafumi@aslm.rim.or.jp> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 23 Jul 1998 14:34:30 -0700" <199807232134.OAA01224@dingo.cdrom.com> References: <199807232134.OAA01224@dingo.cdrom.com>
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Hi,
I was going to respond to this message much earlier, but, I guess I
was too lazy to start dealing with all the e-mails piled up while I
was gone.
By now, person who originally asked for some help probably have either
solved the problem or given up on this, I guess. But I'm commenting
on this just in case someone might be facing the same situation in
future.
>> I want to install 2.2.7 on one of my machines. I have to
>> install it over a serial port because I am blind and need to
>> read the screen during install. My speech software runs under
>> dos. Thus, i must install it on my new machine from my dos
>> box. I'm not sure how to install it on a machine im not
>> physically at.
> FreeBSD supports using the first serial port on your system as
> the console port. If you don't have a video card in the
> system, it will use the serial port instead.
> Then you simply connect the serial port from the FreeBSD system
> to your DOS system, and use a DOS terminal program to provide
> you with a console.
Additionally, if you can find someone to look at the screen just for a
few seconds, you can change FreeBSD installer to use the serial
console even your PC has video card. To do this, ask the sighted
companion to let you know when there is a prompt as:
Boot:
appearing on the screen. From there, type in
-h
using the keyboard connecting to the machine you are installing
FreeBSD.
After that, every message goes to the serial port and you can use your
screen reader and terminal emulator to do the rest. You may need to
do a bit of customization to your screen reader to properly navigate
around the menu, but it's not too complicated and if you have much
experience dealing with various DOS applications, then you probably
won't have much problem figuring out all the mess on the screen. :)
There are several terminal emulators known to be work well with screen
readers. I personally prefer MS-Kermit as I can remap the keyboard to
emulate the meta-key of VT100 terminal. Because of very flexible key
customization feature of the MS-Kermit, however, some screen readers
might have problem with it especially when you want to issue review
commands.
Hope this helps.
Now, as a blind FreeBSD user/developer, I'd like to include
boot.config that has ``-D'' in our boot floppy so that we don't have
to ask any sighted geek to look for the Boot: prompt in order to let
the installer dump everything to the serial port.
Cheers,
Max
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Masafumi NAKANE, Keio Grad. School of Media and Governance
E-Mail : max@wide.ad.jp / max@FreeBSD.ORG / max@w3.org
[URL] : http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/~max/
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