AllowEmptyInput and HAL

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 01:18:59PM -0700, Carl Worth wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 19:32 +0100, Phil Endecott wrote:
> > Daniel Stone wrote:
> > > AllowEmptyInput does not mean that your keyboard and mouse configuration
> > > is being ignored; conversely, it means that it's not a fatal error to
> > > have no keyboard and mouse configuration whatsoever.  So if AEI changes
> > > anything, you don't have a keyboard and mouse configured.
> > 
> > Here is what it reported in the log:
> 
> Hi Phil,
> 
> I don't know if it's exactly the same as your situation, but I recently
> had a situation with X on Debian acting up and resulting in mismapped
> keys.
> 
> The log file in that case showed that the "mouse" driver was getting
> loaded. But clearly something was misinterpreting events. Perhaps
> something was expecting events as they would come from evdev instead? I
> don't know.
> 
> The fix for my situation was to ensure that the "evdev" module was
> loaded instead of the "mouse" module.
> 
> I could have made that happen by editing xorg.conf, but I'm told that
> that's passé now. Instead I copied the attached x11-input.fdi file,
> (which I got from a friend), to /etc/hal/fdi/policy. After doing this,
> hal loaded the "evdev" module for me and everything became happy. This
> didn't quite feel to me like the happy no-configuration-required-for-X
> paradise I had been promised, but there you have it. :-)
> 
> I've been led to understand that this is due to a bug in the Debian
> packaging of hal. But I don't really know if the blame lies with
> upstream HAL, with Debian packaging, or even something else in the X
> server that made things not work.
> 
> All I know is that this is what fixed things for me. So I thought I
> would pass it on in case it helps you as well.

unless I overlooked something, this fdi file is the standard one that should
be installed as part of either the hal package or the X server package (fedora
installs it as part of hal). So in your case it does indeed look like a
distribution packaging error.

the "happy no-configuration-required-for-X paradise" is mostly a "someone else
does the default configuration so you don't have to" :)

Cheers,
  Peter