[newb] Will xorg still allow non-hal config?

[Colin Guthrie]

Xavier Bestel wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-11-30 at 14:11 +0000, Beso wrote:
>> just look at the
>> evdev driver. i think that after its development
>> the usability of keyboards and mouses has increased quite a lot. now i
>> cannot see a reason to switch back to kbd +
>> mouse instead of evdev. 
> 
> I see one: keyboard layout isn't recognized nor easily configured, so at
> login screen you're stuck with a qwerty keyboard.
> Otherwise it's perfect.

I think the real question here is who is responsible for this.

IMO the distro's have to step up to the plate here.

Certainly in Mandriva we have configuration tools (drakconf) to manage 
things in a fairly central way. Other distros use tools provided in 
Gnome or KDE to do this, but most of these take effect after the DE has 
started (I could be pretty off-base here so please forgive me if this is 
perhaps an over simplification).

In Mandriva it will be fairly simple to write a tools into our drakconf 
that would take /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-keymap.fdi, copy 
it to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/ and edit the keymap to the correct 
local flavour.

Our installation wizard already asks the necessary questions and we keep 
the answer in /etc/sysconfig/keyboard so even upgrades can have the 
correct file written for them.

Is this something that should be left up to distros to do? I don't know.

Paulo (PCPA) was talking about an option that could be put in to 
xorg.conf that would allow setting of the default keymap via an Option 
in e.g. ServerFlags section. Is this wise or is this just spreading the 
config around the place (bits of it in HAL, some in xorg.conf). Is it 
already the case that config is spread around?

IMO distros have to shoulder some responsibility here. A recent example 
has been pulseaudio integration into the desktop. Some distros did very 
little work here (the Ubuntu LTS was particularly poor IIRC, with the 
latter version making up for that mistake). At Mandriva, I personally 
took a lot of time to ensure good integration and I know that RedHat and 
Debian did likewise.

So is this input config stuff something that distro's should be doing in 
their own way (at least for the default DM stage - DE's can take over 
after that)?

This is a genuinely open question, not one that is "loaded" in one way 
or another!

Col


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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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