On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 7:50 AM, Ty John wrote:

On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:08:42 -0500 "Jeffrey Lynn Parke Jr." wrote:

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the usb mice don't work without hal, or do they now. They didn't used to

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Damjan Georgievski wrote:

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Does anyone know how much of HAL is needed in ArchLinux these days? I'm asking because I've learned that both udev and HAL configure the keymap of input devices nowdays and I wonder what other former HAL features are already implemented in udev.

-- damjan

USB mice have worked without hal for a long time. It's just hotplugging that won't work.

Well, I recently copied /etc/group.pacnew to /etc/group which didn't have the hal and gdm groups. HAL didn't start, and when I started KDE (xinit startkde) or GDM or KDM, neither keyboard nor mouse worked. After adding hal group, it worked fine, since HAL started succesfully. -- Nilesh Govindarajan Site & Server Administrator www.itech7.com

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Ty John wrote:

On Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:08:22 +0530 Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:

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USB mice have worked without hal for a long time. It's just hotplugging that won't work.

Well, I recently copied /etc/group.pacnew to /etc/group which didn't have the hal and gdm groups. HAL didn't start, and when I started KDE (xinit startkde) or GDM or KDM, neither keyboard nor mouse worked. After adding hal group, it worked fine, since HAL started succesfully.

But did you put it in your xorg.conf file?

What to put ? -- Nilesh Govindarajan Site & Server Administrator www.itech7.com

On 03/16/2010 10:54 PM, Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Ty John wrote:

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On Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:08:22 +0530 Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:

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USB mice have worked without hal for a long time. It's just hotplugging that won't work.

Well, I recently copied /etc/group.pacnew to /etc/group which didn't have the hal and gdm groups. HAL didn't start, and when I started KDE (xinit startkde) or GDM or KDM, neither keyboard nor mouse worked. After adding hal group, it worked fine, since HAL started succesfully.

But did you put it in your xorg.conf file?

What to put ? in addition to what Ty posted there is also http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Get_All_Mouse_Buttons_Working that has some pointers

On Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:16 +0530, "Nilesh Govindarajan" wrote:

I don't have seven mouse buttons. The mouse and keyboard is already configured in xorg.conf using drivers mouse and kbd. If I stop hal, and then start Xorg, it doesn't work. I've to hard reset my box.

That's because you haven't configured Xorg. Without HAL, you need to create entries in your Xorg.conf regarding mouse/keyboard. This is documented all over the internet, and a new config using Xorg -configure will probably also contain the appropriate lines.

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Javier Vasquez wrote:

On 3/17/10, James Rayner wrote:

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On Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:16 +0530, "Nilesh Govindarajan" wrote:

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I don't have seven mouse buttons. The mouse and keyboard is already configured in xorg.conf using drivers mouse and kbd. If I stop hal, and then start Xorg, it doesn't work. I've to hard reset my box.

That's because you haven't configured Xorg. Without HAL, you need to create entries in your Xorg.conf regarding mouse/keyboard. This is documented all over the internet, and a new config using Xorg -configure will probably also contain the appropriate lines.

Besides having entries for mouse and keyboard, now it's required to include a server flags section:

Section "ServerFlags"        Option  "AutoAddDevices"        "False"        Option  "AllowEmptyInput"       "False" EndSection

1st flag is to prevent Xorg to automatically load devices through HAL, and 2nd is to prevent Xorg to start with no devices (so it makes sure you have the entries configuring them).

This was documented somewhere I don't remember where though...

-- Javier.

Let it be. I'm happy with what I have now. WIll migrate to udev once KDE and Xorg officially stop using HAL. -- Nilesh Govindarajan Site & Server Administrator www.itech7.com

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??? -- | ~^~ ~^~ | <?> <?> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | \___/ <>

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 06:04:54AM +0800, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:

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.

Is it actually possible today to replace the automatic X11 input device selection done by HAL by some udev rules ? If yes, is there any guide/wiki/other_doc describing the required incantations ? Ciao, -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte !