gibbo...@gmail.com wrote:
1) I don't want hal, one more daemon running only to... spot /dev/input/*,
from what I understand xf86-input-* does this pretty well. I won't
unplug my mouse and so want to keep my xorg simple conf.
Hal does a lot more than just monitor /dev/input for you.
It's a framework for providing consolidated and consistent
access to *all* hardware information on your system.
Gnome's automounting, for example, relies on hal to let it
know when a new device was plugged in, what mount point its
on, what type of device it is, etc. The vendor database of
FDI files includes information about everything from
batteries to power management to keyboards to rf kill
switches.
And really, how much simpler an xorg.conf can you get than
by deleting 2/3 of it?
2) Anyway, I tried to make use of evdev instead of the *deprecated*
mouse and kbd drivers but...
3) evdev without hal replaced well my mouse driver (for the moment I
just replaced /dev/input/mice by /dev/input/event2 in the mouse section)
4) for the keyboard it's far less simple : if I switch to evdev, I
cannot define the Xkb{Variant,Model,..} in xorg.conf so :
stuck with the 'kbd' driver.
There's nothing wrong with continuing to use the old
drivers. Nothing about hal requires you to switch to
evdev... and nothing about evdev requires to you use hal :)
The various non-Linux OS's supported by Xorg won't even have
the proper kernel support for evdev, so the "old" keyboard
and mouse drivers will probably be around for a long time.
They are only "deprecated" in the sense that the Linux
generic input layer exists at all.
I believed gentoo users would be more sceptic when it comes to make a
new daemon mandatory ;)
Well, it's clearly not *mandatory* because you can just
turn it off with -hal :)
Having said that, hal is exactly the kind of thing I would
expect Gentoo users to flock to: its powerful, flexible,
extensible, configurable, and it's the new cutting-edge
stuff from the upstream vendors. Before it went offline,
the Gentoo wiki was easily the most informative place on the
web to find information about hal. I would have predicted
hal going mainsteam on Gentoo years ahead of Red Hat or
Debian.
Also, just for the record, hal isn't by any stretch of the
imagination a "new" daemon. Its been a USE option for
Gentoo's gnome-vfs package since Gnome 2.8, in 2004.
(Any advice to use evdev, define a keyboard layout,model,variant without
having to install hal and its <con<fi<gu>r>ation>files and daemon ?)
Unless you have a general aversion to using XML for anything
(which I understand, if tend to disagree with), the FDI
syntax is pretty straightfoward. That's even without the
abundance of sample code that ships with hal. You basically
need to know two tags: match and merge. In this case:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<deviceinfo>
<device>
<match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
<merge key="input.x11_driver"
type="string">keyboard</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
goes into /etc/hal/fdi/policy/keyboard_driver_ftw.fdi and
restart hal. Since hal lets you "merge" arbitrary keys to
its database, Xorg will also look for any
input.x11_options.foo keys, replacing everything that went
into xorg.conf.
---Mike
