Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[Peter Laursen]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your replies, they have been of great help. I still havenøt 
solved the basic problem of redirecting the output to a console, mostly 
because -nographic does not work on Windows ports of Qemu...

There already are Linux operating systems that ship with screen readers 
that read the graphic desktops built in, so I would only want to run 
text-based operating systems (FreeBSD, for example - I've heard that is 
almost pure command line and I'd like to check it out if possible. I 
know tha Debian is)

Sadly, I couldn't get the -serial option to work either - here's the 
command line that I used to start qemu with:

qemu.exe -L . -m 128 -hda linux.img -soundhw all -localtime -M isapc -
serial tcp:127.0.0.1:5555,server -nographic

that should, in theory, allow me to get the output into a telnet client?

I hadn't thought about piping Festival on a Windows box - but I'd like 
to see if I can get this to work first before I try that.

Any other suggestions or anything else I could try?

I look forward to hearing from you and thank you very much for your 
help.

Best regards,

Peter.


> Hi Peter,
> 
> there already exists a QEMU command line option -nographic which
> disables graphical output and redirects the first serial port
> of the emulated machine to the console.
> 
> With QEMU running Linux in text mode, this works fine - you will
> "see" the boot messages and can run a shell or any text application
> from the console, so it should be possible to analyse this output
> with a screen reader.
> 
> QEMU can also redirect any serial port to pipes, so some
> speech synthesizer like "festival" could be connected directly.
> 
> This URL describes the command line options -serial and -nographic:
> http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html#TOC10
> 
> I have no idea how you can access graphical interfaces like MS 
Windows.
> 
> Stefan
> 
> Peter Laursen schrieb:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I have downloaded the 0.9.0 version of the Qemu source code and 
managed
> > to compile it using MinGW and MSYS. But I face a problem with the
> > compiled binary.
> >
> > I am blind and therefore need to redirect the output from the guest 
OS
> > to a standard Windows console or a software speech synthesizer so 
that
> > a screen reader will be able to read the output produced. What
> > functions will I eventually need to modify? A text console would of
> > course be preferred.
> > My main reason for hoping to getting this to work is to allow blind
> > people to experiment safely with other operating systems - it would
> > also minimize the learning curve.
> >
> > I hope that you will be able to point me in the right directions as 
to
> > which source files and functions I would need to change. I have
> > searched through the source files and googled for documentation for 
the
> > source code, but I didn't find any. I also searched to see if there
> > were any patches that might accomplish the work - I was unable to 
find
> > any.
> >
> > I look forward to hearing from you.
> >
> > Peter.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 

Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 25/06/07, Peter Laursen <qemu@tdlsoftware.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Thanks for your replies, they have been of great help. I still havenøt
> solved the basic problem of redirecting the output to a console, mostly
> because -nographic does not work on Windows ports of Qemu...
>
> There already are Linux operating systems that ship with screen readers
> that read the graphic desktops built in, so I would only want to run
> text-based operating systems (FreeBSD, for example - I've heard that is
> almost pure command line and I'd like to check it out if possible. I
> know tha Debian is)

That's not true, FreeBSD as well as all Linux flavours are unix clones
and they can run all the same software, including the GNOME and KDE
environments, as well as all the command line world. Debian's
installer is text based and FreeBSD's installer is text based but the
rest depends on whatever you configured in the installer.

>
> Sadly, I couldn't get the -serial option to work either - here's the
> command line that I used to start qemu with:
>
> qemu.exe -L . -m 128 -hda linux.img -soundhw all -localtime -M isapc -
> serial tcp:127.0.0.1:5555,server -nographic

In addition to that you need to tell Linux to actually run a console
on the serial port instead of on the video card. This can be done in
the bootloader by appending "console=ttyS0" to kernel parameters, but
there's unfortunately no way to interact with the bootloader without a
video adapter because bootloaders are configured that way on most
distributions. Assuming you have a sound enabled SSH client you could
SSH into the linux guest and interact with it that way, from there you
can reconfigure the system to make a serial console.

Unrelated to that, there's a patch for QEMU that adds an curses based
interface similar to the one that the bochs emulator has. I imagine it
can be a hell to set up on ms windows, if at all possible, but it
eliminates the use serial ports, it lets you interact with the
bootloader and no reconfiguration is needed.

Have you tried distributions like Oralux, BLINUX or Free(b)soft? I
know Free(b)soft is all command line based (or actually emacs based)
and sound enabled at the same time, by employing festival if no
hardware sythesiser or braille tty (brltty) is found.

I still think SSH is the most universal way to interact with any
system and lets you experience all the non-graphical parts of the OS,
including Debian installer or FreeBSD installer.

Regards,

[Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[Peter Laursen]

Hi everyone,

I have downloaded the 0.9.0 version of the Qemu source code and managed 
to compile it using MinGW and MSYS. But I face a problem with the 
compiled binary.

I am blind and therefore need to redirect the output from the guest OS 
to a standard Windows console or a software speech synthesizer so that 
a screen reader will be able to read the output produced. What 
functions will I eventually need to modify? A text console would of 
course be preferred.
My main reason for hoping to getting this to work is to allow blind 
people to experiment safely with other operating systems - it would 
also minimize the learning curve.

I hope that you will be able to point me in the right directions as to 
which source files and functions I would need to change. I have 
searched through the source files and googled for documentation for the 
source code, but I didn't find any. I also searched to see if there 
were any patches that might accomplish the work - I was unable to find 
any. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Peter.

Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[Stefan Weil]

Hi Peter,

there already exists a QEMU command line option -nographic which
disables graphical output and redirects the first serial port
of the emulated machine to the console.

With QEMU running Linux in text mode, this works fine - you will
"see" the boot messages and can run a shell or any text application
from the console, so it should be possible to analyse this output
with a screen reader.

QEMU can also redirect any serial port to pipes, so some
speech synthesizer like "festival" could be connected directly.

This URL describes the command line options -serial and -nographic:
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html#TOC10

I have no idea how you can access graphical interfaces like MS Windows.

Stefan

Peter Laursen schrieb:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have downloaded the 0.9.0 version of the Qemu source code and managed
> to compile it using MinGW and MSYS. But I face a problem with the
> compiled binary.
>
> I am blind and therefore need to redirect the output from the guest OS
> to a standard Windows console or a software speech synthesizer so that
> a screen reader will be able to read the output produced. What
> functions will I eventually need to modify? A text console would of
> course be preferred.
> My main reason for hoping to getting this to work is to allow blind
> people to experiment safely with other operating systems - it would
> also minimize the learning curve.
>
> I hope that you will be able to point me in the right directions as to
> which source files and functions I would need to change. I have
> searched through the source files and googled for documentation for the
> source code, but I didn't find any. I also searched to see if there
> were any patches that might accomplish the work - I was unable to find
> any.
>
> I look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Peter.

Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[Natalia Portillo]

Hi Peter,

Apart from what Stefan said you,
the only way that will be useful for learning graphical operating
systems will be having a screen-reader capable of doing OCR of the
entire screen, or at least, part of it (the QEMU window).

I don't know if there are OCR screen readers but I've heard about the
idea long ago related to enabling blind people to read non-aware PDF
documents.

Regards,
Natalia Portillo

Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[Luke-Jr]

On Sunday 24 June 2007 23:21, Natalia Portillo wrote:
> Apart from what Stefan said you,
> the only way that will be useful for learning graphical operating
> systems will be having a screen-reader capable of doing OCR of the
> entire screen, or at least, part of it (the QEMU window).

Or perhaps figure out how a braille display would interface with the computer 
and emulate that?

Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu on Windows: Redirect output to console

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 24 June 2007 09:28:58 Peter Laursen wrote:
> I am blind and therefore need to redirect the output from the guest OS
> to a standard Windows console or a software speech synthesizer so that
> a screen reader will be able to read the output produced. What
> functions will I eventually need to modify? A text console would of
> course be preferred.

If you use a serial console in the child OS and tell qemu -nographic, the 
serial console will be redirected to stdin and stdout of the qemu process.

Rob
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
  - Ken Thompson.