Bug#1035813: brltty: Fails to start on early boot

[Samuel Thibault]

Sebastian Humenda, le mar. 09 mai 2023 15:53:05 +0200, a ecrit:
> On my Debian Bookworm system, I've configured BRLTTY with speech output over
> espeak-ng and a USB braille device. However, I am unable to use BRLTTY for my
> password entry of my encrypted /home partition;

Does it start after that?

> I've enabled the option that BRLTTY is pat of the initramfs, but I suspect it
> is present, but not started. Is there any other action required?

AFAIK all is needed is enabling it in /etc/default/brltty and running
update-initramf -u (which prints "Installing BRLTTY into initramfs)

> I also think that the dependencies of BRLTTY prevent it from being started by
> systemd at an earlier stage. I'm not familiar with the Systemd boot process,
> but it could be related to requiring paths like /var/lib/brltty to be mounted

Yes, the brltty service expresses that it needs /var/lib/brlty and
BrlAPI. But that shouldn't be requiring /home/

> and /home just unfortunately being earlier.

There is no notion of "earlier" in systemd, just dependencies.

I tried to install a system with an encrypted /home, and brltty does get
started before the /home passphrase step. You can probably check
journalctl and other systemd tools to see what is actually happening.

Samuel