Willie Walker's Weblog

We've had BrlTTY running and shipping on OpenSolaris for a very long time now, but we've never made it convenient for the user to launch BrlTTY. As it ships today, there is no support to launch BrlTTY as a system service. Instead, users typically need to launch BrlTTY by issuing a command by hand.

I spent some time digging out of e-mail after a productive trip to Ireland last week (blog to come soon), and made faster progress at that than I had expected. One of the e-mails was YAHDILBOOS ("Yet Another How Do I Launch BrlTTY On OpenSolaris", pronounced "yaddle booze"), so I figured it was time to bite the bullet and make an SMF manifest for BrlTTY. Other than doing some trivial ones for the accessible live CD, I never really dug into the SMF facilities. It was actually quite easy after reading the various documentation on SMF.

For me, the hardest thing to find was how to use a property. Sure, I could define a property in the XML manifest, and I could set and get it using the setprop and listprop options of svccfg, but I had a fair amount of difficulty finding docs that actually described how to use properties. From the man page for smf_method, I figured out that you can just use %{property_name}. That was all I needed and I got everything sorted out from there. The XML file and the writeup on how to use it is available under the "Running BrlTTY on Solaris" section on the Braille page of the Orca WIKI.

Note that this merely sets up an SMF service to launch BrlTTY and assumes your braille display is connected and turned on. At some point, I want to do some autodetection that a braille display has been connected to the machine and automatically launch BrlTTY when that happens. I've logged OpenSolaris defect #7614 to track that.