Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:24:02
Message-Id: 4B54FB82.6050708@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale by Iain Buchanan
1 Iain Buchanan wrote:
2 > On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 23:25 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
3 >
4 >> On Monday 18 January 2010 22:47:05 Dale wrote:
5 >>
6 >>> In that case, ctrl alt F1 does nothing. You also need to understand
7 >>> that most people don't even know how to use SysRq keys. I didn't and
8 >>> had to do a hard shutdown. I had to actually pull the plug to do any
9 >>> good. Luckily I knew how to get it to boot into single user mode so I
10 >>> could disable hal otherwise I would be right back on the same screen
11 >>> again with no mouse or keyboard. It would be really bad if even that
12 >>> didn't work with devicekit. I'm not sure how it couldn't but we never
13 >>> know do we?
14 >>>
15 >> Dale's experiences highlight a very important and very fundamental rule of
16 >> desktop system design:
17 >>
18 >> As a developer you must completely and totally guarantee to the full limit of
19 >> what is feasible, that the user will always have a usable keyboard, mouse and
20 >> display after the desktop has launched. You can fallback to VGA resolution and
21 >> the most basic keyboard layout possible if you need to, but you must give the
22 >> user something and never leave them stranded. Anything else is just an epic
23 >> fail.
24 >>
25 >
26 > My 2c worth is this: In any other distribution, the xorg/hal update
27 > would have been configured so that Dale's (sorry to keep using you as an
28 > example :) keyboard / mouse was working. But this is Gentoo. You ARE
29 > the distributor AND the end user. Conflicts in libraries / packages are
30 > up to you to resolve.
31 >
32 > About 3-4 people use Gentoo at work, and at least 2 were hit by the
33 > keyboard/mouse not working bug in xorg when it moved to HAL. With a bit
34 > of fuddling, remerging, and so on, we got it working in both cases.
35 >
36 > So yes, the developer must give a fallback method of using the
37 > keyboard / mouse, but not against the incorrectly packaged / configured
38 > system. In Gentoo you often end up with an incorrect system, hence
39 > revdep-rebuild and so on.
40 >
41 >
42
43 I didn't distribute hal, heck, I didn't even want it really. It's
44 required by KDE is the only reason I have it at all. I just had to
45 disable it for xorg is all to get a working X.
46
47 Surely this wasn't my fault?
48
49 Dale
50
51 :-) :-)

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale Iain Buchanan <iaindb@××××××××××××.au>