Xorg Input Hotplugging

[Ben Gamari]

Hey all,

I have been trying to get Xorg input hotplugging to work on my laptop.
To start, I attempted starting Xorg with an xorg-enabled build of hal.
Unfortunately, I was surprised when I quickly found that my keyboard
mappings were off in several places (the up arrow acts like print
screen, etc).

Some investigation revealed that the evdev driver had taken the liberty
of claiming my keyboard and track stick in addition to the newly
hotplugged usb mouse. After deleting my old InputDevice section (using
the kbd driver), I restarted xorg and found that my keyboard issues
continued. Looking through the manpage of the evdev driver produced that
most QWERTY keyboard users will need to pass "evBits," "keyBits", and
"Pass" options to the evdev driver. After trying to add a new
InputDevice section using the evdev driver and the required options,
restarting xorg failed with:

expected keysym, got XF86KbdLightOnOff: line 70 of pc
expected keysym, got XF86KbdBrightnessDown: line 71 of pc
expected keysym, got XF86KbdBrightnessUp: line 72 of pc
The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
> Warning:          Multiple names for keycode 211
>                   Using <I211>, ignoring <AB11>
expected keysym, got XF86KbdLightOnOff: line 70 of pc
expected keysym, got XF86KbdBrightnessDown: line 71 of pc
expected keysym, got XF86KbdBrightnessUp: line 72 of pc
expected keysym, got XF86MonBrightnessDown: line 136 of inet
expected keysym, got XF86MonBrightnessUp: line 137 of inet
expected keysym, got XF86KbdLightOnOff: line 140 of inet
expected keysym, got XF86KbdBrightnessDown: line 141 of inet
expected keysym, got XF86KbdBrightnessUp: line 142 of inet
Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server
Synaptics DeviceInit called
SynapticsCtrl called.
Synaptics DeviceOn called
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/TTF/, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/OTF, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/Type1/, removing from list!
(EE) AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint-isa0060/serio1/input0: Button: 74.
(EE) AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint-isa0060/serio1/input0: state->btn: 0x8322d10.
(EE) AT Translated Set 2 keyboard-isa0060/serio0/input0: Don't know how to use device.
(EE) PreInit failed for input device "AT Translated Set 2 keyboard"


Does xorg infer the evdev options when hal notifies it of a new keyboard
device? Additionally, it looks like evdev attempts to take over my
synaptics touchpad as well. Should the driver be checking whether
devices are already in use before it claims them for itself? Thanks a
ton,

- Ben