An evening filled with success!

[Lee Maschmeyer]

John,

If you installed everything during the package selection, brltty (albeit an
old one) is ready to use. From the root prompt, type:

brltty -b XX

where XX is the name of your braille display; al for Alva, bn for
BrailleNote, cb for CombiBraille, ... There's probably a file called
/etc/brltty.conf that gives the details if they're not too succinct.

As for the networking, try the command:

dhclient

If that doesn't work, read its documentation. (That's not quite a joke - I
don't have it available here so can't check whether it's automatic or not.
But if I did have it, I'd likely still try it first and read later.)

Lee