evdev-1.2.0 / hal-0.5.10 combo broken?

[Tomas Carnecky]

Remy Bosch wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> On gentoo forums there are some problems reported with the above
> mentioned drivers. I for one, am dealing with a  non-working  "up".
> The proposed method of dealing with it, is downgrading an earlier
> version. Is there an other way to get around it *with* Hal?
> 
> Issues with hal even got far enough for one maintainer to run screaming,
> because Hal  is run in a similar fashion to the "good-old" Xfree86.
> Meaning core-only. I guess they have their reasons, but it appears hard
> to maintain this package. Or at least time-consuming to keep track of
> all the patches that are needed, but aren't accepted.
> 
> I take it that the evdev/hal combo is too new to have man pages related
> to the configuration of the input drivers (for non-developers)?

It certainly seems so. I recently updated packages in my system, but it 
wasn't until yesterday that I had to restart X (compiz locked up hard, 
had so ssh into the computer and kill it). And after that things went 
downhill.

I have a rather complex configuration: colemak keyboard layout, a 
somewhat strange keyboard and mouse (logitech dinovo edge, more on that 
later), nvidia card with proprietary drivers and two monitors configured 
as two separate screens.

I have a ~100 lines xorg.conf and until now I didn't have any problems. 
But after the restart the keyboard started behaving strangely, the 
builtin mouse only worked on the y-axis or the multimedia buttons didn't 
work. The dinovo egde keyboard exports two event devices, one with 
handlers 'kdb event' and one with handlers 'kbd mouse event'. The former 
is the plain 105 keys keyboard, the later is the mouse+multimedia keys. 
So one event device needs to act both as a mouse and keyboard. Similar 
with the mouse, it exports two devices, one kbd and one mouse. I don't 
know how that worked until now, but it did.

After the problems started, either the x-axis of the keyboard mouse 
didn't work or the multimedia keys didn't work or emulate3buttons didn't 
work, I started adding more input sections to xorg.conf, 
starting/stopping hal etc but nothing helped. I even tried without a 
xorg.conf, but that didn't work at all because, 1) the server doesn't 
try the nvidia driver, it expects nv/vga/fbdev, with the nv driver 
xrandr shows only a single screen, the second screen is a corrupted 
mirror of the first one 2) how can I configure the keyboard layout? On 
the normal console I use querty, but in X I'd like to use colemak. What 
is fdi/policy, how can I use these files?

Maybe it would be possible to configure everything using hal 
configuration files, but what would be the point? Instead of one 
xorg.conf I'd have dozens of hal config files? It seems like I'll have 
to stick with xorg.conf and pay attention to not start hal and let it 
configure X, because that clearly doesn't work yet.

I'm running hal-0.5.10, evdev-1.2.0, xorg-server-1.4.0.90, gentoo ~amd64 
system.

tom