Creating serial output without losing keyboard control

[Cheryl Homiak]

I'm not sure whether or not this list is the appropriate place for  
broaching this subject or not, but it was the most logical choice I  
could find.

I am blind and using grub in debian; I also have used grub in fedora  
and gentoo. I have predominantly used grub legacy but am starting to  
attempt to use grub2. My only problems with grub are that I can not  
tell for sure when grub has loaded when booting and I can not read  
the menu. I use speech and braille devices connected to serial ports,  
but their screen-reading programs do not start until after grub has  
booted the kernel.

When I used lilo, I could use the serial command in the configuration  
to allow me to at least see when the boot occurred and to add ctrl-G  
to a message file so I also got an auditory beep. I can do this in  
grub with the pause command, but if I do that I can never allow the  
computer to boot unattended say, after a power failure, because it  
will wait for a keypress before continuing. It just occurs to me as I  
write this that maybe there is a way to use a timeout variable to  
avoid this problem, but I haven't checked that.

Also, I can hear some of the menu if I use the "serial" and  
"terminal" commands. However, there does not appear to be a way to  
use the "serial" command to see the output through a serial device  
without also invoking the "terminal" command. This means that  
although I can now hear the output I have no way to make selections  
because I can not make responses via the keyboard. I also tried using  
"terminal serial console" but with a zero timeout this simply takes  
output and input both to the serial port and without a zero timeout  
it waits for a keypress; if I press a key on my keyboard control of  
course returns to the console but I also am back to not being able to  
read the output via the serial port.

Is there any possibility of providing an option to separate the  
output from the input. I need to be able to receive the output via my  
braille or speech equipment through the serial port but maintain  
input control at the keyboard so I can respond to that output. Of  
course to some extent I can estimate when loading of grub takes place  
and to some extent I can just memorize my kernel choices and arrow  
down with no feedback, but there are times when these really aren't  
the best practices to have to follow.

Since it's my understanding that grub legacy is not being actively  
developed, it made more sense to me to request this feature in grub2.


Thank you for any suggestions or any development that might be able  
to address this issue.

--
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also".