On Sat, 2010-06-26 at 20:24 +0200, Florian Philipp wrote: > Hi list! > > I'm a bit confused about the meaning of the hal useflag on the > x11-base/xorg-server ebuilds nowadays. When I deactivate it, hot-plugin > a mouse does not work and special keys on the keyboard are not detected. > When I enable it, everything works but several driver packages (evdev > and mouse, probably others) want me to deactivate it. > > Does this have anything to do with me still using /etc/X11/xorg.conf and > not auto configuration? Or maybe the update to Gnome-2.28? Or the > general deprecation of hal? > > In short: Did I miss any update advice or do I have to fiddle around > with the settings and useflags until something usable is found, like usual?
Originally Xorg required you to pretty much specify all your devices and configuration in your xorg.conf file. Then the option came to use hal to help with identifying, hot-plugging, and auto-configuring devices. Well in general hal has fallen out of favor for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. So many softwares that used hal before are or have migrated to something else, such as udev. Xorg has also chosen to do this, and so the newer Xorg servers can use udev instead of hal. There is a udev flag for xorg-server. You can/should use this instead of hal. Using neither hal nor udev gives you the "legacy" mode where everything is (must be) configured via configuration file. -a
