On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Tim Pennick wrote: > The hardware solution became more or less obsolete for Windows access, when > screens could no longer be relied on to be a fixed size, (although thinking > about it, I'm not sure why this should have been such a problem). For 25-line > X 80-column screens, its very hard to beat. Think about increased hardware cost. For many people cost is the first criterion. Think about flexibility. You can't use such hardware solution on a laptop, or even on a Linux handheld like the iPAQ, etc. > When I switch on my machine, I > see the memory check, and BIOS password prompt, and then all the information > even before the kernel is booted. That's true. But this doesn't constitute an advantage worth the additional ressource required, unless of course you spend more time in your BIOS setup screen than within Linux! :-) If you already own the hardware then use it of course, but I wouldn't recomment anybody to purchase such solution. > Even though I've tried brltty, and found it to be an excellent piece of > software, it still doesn't provide the snappy response to braille navigation > functions as the hardware solution. What braille display did you try it with? It happens that some displays are quite sluggish but some others are really snappy. Nicolas