On Wed, 2010-03-17 at 14:31 -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
It would appear that on Mar 17, Jan de Groot did say:
At this moment several applications, including XFCE and KDE, use hal for removable device handling. xorg-server still uses hal to configure input devices. Starting from xorg-server 1.8, we'll disable the hal backend and switch to udev, devices will get configured through udev rules in that case. This will cause some breakage of existing setups, but there's no way to enable both backends. KDE should support udisks/upower in the next major release. I don't know about XFCE though, but if that one follows, I'm almost sure hal will no longer exist in 2011.
Hopefully the nice wiki Beginners'Guide will get updated to tell dummies like me how to set up x without it... And just as important, a nice "how to fix your hal dependent, thus borked in 2011 arch system" wiki document that is as easy for newbies to find and follow as the said beginners guide...
I'm new to Arch, and way to used to the way other distro's do things. Following this guide (last night) was the very first time I got a working x server that wasn't handed to me by the installation cd/dvd. And I gotta say that so far I'm VERY impressed with the arch wiki documents. They actually seem to be written to instruct the guy who doesn't already know the answers...
So how will this up and coming demise of hal affect idiots like me who don't know how to do what we can't find in the wiki???
Those following the Beginner's Guide shouldn't be too concerned about the 'up-and-coming' anything, IMO. It will (and should only) be updated when it becomes necessary to, that is, when the previous steps stop working. Which is not yet the case, since hal is still (unfortunately or fortunately depending on your view) alive and kicking, feebly.