Hello again, My efforts to recover from a dead computer continue. I have resurrected the old disk in a new box, but the new box has a different graphics chip and installing the (Debian packaged) driver for that has brought in new bits of everything, and it has all gone bad.
Specifically, when X started I had no keyboard or mouse. After power-cycling [no other way to escape!] I found a message in the log saying that "AllowEmptyInput" was enabled and that my keyboard and mouse configuration was being ignored. Having looked this up in man xorg.conf I see that this mode is the default. I'll try to be polite: This does not seem like the most useful behaviour. Having set AutoAddDevices to false in order to disable the unhelpful AllowEmptyInput, I now have a functioning mouse. But I have a keyboard where every alternate keystroke produces the right letter and the others produce garbage (maybe top-bit-set characters?). I also noticed some messages in the log where "config/hal" complained that "NewInputDeviceRequest failed". Presumably this is because of my AutoAddDevices. I had noticed that Debian installed "hal"; I had not previously heard of it. It looks like something that sits on top of udev. So I've now spent most of three days on this. I just want a computer that works, preferably as well as the old one did, and while I don't have one I can't do much work [I'm self-employed]. So could someone please suggest what I should do: - Is there some simple set of xorg.conf settings that will make it just work like it did before, without any AllowEmptyInput and HAL stuff and with a functional keyboard? - Or would I be better off trying to learn how this HAL thing works? X is something that I only have to understand once every few years when I have some new hardware. By the next time I need to understand it, either I have forgotten something vital or it has all changed.... Cheers, Phil. _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg