Slackware 13.0 – Xorg + Hal
A lot of people have been coming a cropper on the new Xorg in Slackware 13.0. Because Xorg now loads hardware information automatically via hal by default, people are confused about how to set things up that they’re used to setting up in the xorg.conf.
Now, a lot of people have been choosing to shy away from the hal-based auto-detection and simply turn it off. That was my initial reaction too, but the bottom line is that this was brought in as an improvement and if you can get your head around it it may prove to save you effort in the long run.
The two things that affect me in a normal set-up are graphics and keyboard layout.
Graphics
If you’re going to use the open source driver shipped with the kernel for your graphics card you almost certainly don’t have to do a thing. Hal will pick up your card, and your driver will be loaded into Xorg. If you need a different driver like the proprietary nVidia driver, then it’s business as usual: run the installer, let it create an xorg.conf for you and that information will be used by Xorg.
You might want to check the xorg.conf that gets created as the installer may not be ready for hal yet and may try to insert useless keyboard/mouse information because the installer thinks it’s required.
Keyboard Layout
Being in the UK, I use UK keyboards. They are different ot US keyboards in that they have £ above 3 instead of # and ” above 2 instead of @ as well as couple of other subtle differences. I also use the GB Dvorak layout for my IRC box and again, this needs a modification.
You’re probably used to loading up your xorg.conf and modifying:
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
to:
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
or whatever is relevant to your locale. Well, it’s different now, but practically just as simple. Instead of telling Xorg about your layout, you now tell hal instead. To do this, you need to change the hal config, but you don’t modify the configuration ‘in-place’, you copy the config to a secondary location, and then make the changes you need. In Slackware 13.0:
vi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi
Modify:
<merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string" />
To:
<merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string" />
Or for uk-dvorak:
<merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string">dvorak</merge>
Restart hal. Restart X.
Job done.
Post followed-up by:
Slackware 13.37 – Xorg + Hal
Hallelujah! You’re my savior man. My own personal Jesus Christ
Seriously, I abandoned gentoo because it suddenly threw hal at me when i updated xorg and went with something more traditional (slackware…) for my new samsung nc20. Then, when almost everything was up and working I wanted to finetune my keyboard. I messed for hours with my xorg.conf and other sidetracks and at the end I copied a .fdi file from an ubuntu forum which gave very funny results. (My two xterms come alive, Fluxbox goes up, the highlighted xterm start outputting lots of any one figure, which changes when I press a key, then after a while X crashes…)
This guide was so simple, and so… working. Thank you.
@Mattias
No probs.
Oh great ! That’s fantastic
– what I used to do doesn’t work, but the new thing is similar but different, and no one warned me
Great
That’s just the kind of thing linux needs to build popularity
Ah – but now HAL is deprecated
I’ve been trying for years to believe that linux is going to be a stable manageable alternative to microsoft. Tried to find a place for it in my small computer business. Regularly suffered loss of some important bit of function or another, despite only using versions with long-term support.
When I think of all the work that has gone into it over the years, it makes me want to weep.
However until I hear from the general buzz that there’s a really stable system that I’m not going to have to spend my weekends fixing I think I’m giving up Windows is hateful but fixing it is a lot easier.
God I really hate to do this, but I’m going to nuke my server. Just one ‘improvement’ too far.
@tomm174
Stability is yours to control. If you stick with one version of Slackware it will be stable and security patches will be available as long as you need them. If you constantly upgrade as soon as a new version is available then you need to be prepared for the work involved.
Yea… but without a few puzzles to keep us occupied the Linux world would be filled with windoze mousers… ! having said that,I think that XP is one of the best thing that ever happened to GNU Linux.
Now that Linux has been steadily improving for last ten years and Windows declining in so many ways, (ME, Vista, 7, what are they thinking?) Linux is *almost* as user friendly as the other system, haha, except for the usual quirks of course.