Re: [gentoo-user] Another angle on hal/xorg thread

[Mike Edenfield]

On 11/4/2009 10:51 AM, Harry Putnam wrote:
> I didn't want to derail the ongoing thread about hal/xorg with this
> question there.
>
> Far as I remember I haven't done anything special concerning hal but
> at some point hal disappeared.  And is not on my system anymore.

I believe that some packages in portage recently masked off the "hal" 
USE flag (GNOME stuff, maybe?), so if those were the only packages 
relying on hal it might have gone away.

> I've always used and /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for starting X.
> What I'm wondering from seeing this kind of topic frequently here is
> if I'm running in some deprecated mode?
>
> If my setup using no hal, and xorg.conf is going to become outdated
> and stop working anytime soon?

The answer is a solid "who the heck knows".

If it works for you now, don't mess with it.  Wait for the 
Xorg/hal/devkit/whatever situation to settle down before you go making 
any drastic changes.

Some people, like myself, are running X with hal and no .conf file and 
it works like a champ.  I get better hardware detection with hal, 
especially on my laptop, than I ever got manually.

Other people have had problems with hal and Xorg not detecting their 
hardware at all.  What you are "frequently" seeing is those people 
reminding everyone, every time the topic come up, that you don't *need* 
to use the new hal-ified way if it doesn't work for you.

All of this is probably moot because hal itself is going away and being 
replaced by devicekit, but not yet because devicekit isn't quite ready. 
  What the configuration situation will be under devicekit I have no 
idea, though I would hope having no configuration file would still be a 
goal for the devkit team.


--Mike