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Good experiences with X.Org autoconfiguration

There has been some grumbling about the new X.Org autoconfiguration and its dependancy on hald, but I've actually had decent experience with it. In short - it's so automated it's boring.

Keywords: FreeBSD, X.Org, X11, configuration

I have no xorg.conf on the AMD64 system I'm typing this post from. Simply none at all. X.Org and Xfce 4.6 were installed from port, startx started and I have a nice desktop. My video card is powered by the radeonhd driver, my mouse is USB, my keyboard is PS/s. The only puzzling thing was how to get the keyboard layout correct - Xfce doesn't have a keyboard layout applet so X.Org needs to take care of it. I really didn't want to create a new xorg.conf file so I sought other solutions.

Adding "setxkbmap hr" to xinitrc will set the keyboard layout to "HR" (replace with other layouts as needed). Of course, X.Org cannot detect the keyboard layout (though maybe it's time to embed these two bytes in the keyboard hardwere somewhere... or switch to English globally).

My rc.conf contains these lines:

hald_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
polkitd_enable="YES"

I should also add Avahi there - I'll see if I need it.

Polkitd needs these lines in /usr/local/etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf for the users to be able to shutdown/restart the system:

<match action="org.freedesktop.hal.power-management.shutdown">
    <return result="yes"/>
</match>

<match action="org.freedesktop.hal.power-management.reboot">
    <return result="yes"/>
</match>

 

Posted on 2009-04-18T23:56 by ivoras

#1 Re: Good experiences with X.Org autoconfiguration

Added on 2009-04-20T09:56 by Sven Esbjerg

Good for you.

I have had nothing but problems with xorg and hal. I use the nvidia-driver and I have two monitors where one is flipped.


Every time I upgrade xorg and the nvidia driver keyboard and mouse input stops working. I just upgraded to xorg-server 1.6 and now I cannot switch to console after X has been started resulting in a reboot for each try to fix my new input problem. Very nice - NOT!

 

So in my expericence the change to hal has gotten me nothing but trouble.

 

#2 Re: Good experiences with X.Org autoconfiguration

Added on 2009-04-20T11:18 by Manolis

Just followed your advice, with a small exception: If I add polkitd_enable="YES" to rc.conf, I can only startx once. When I return to console and startx again, I end up with a grey screen and a mouse cursor. If I kill the server, it never really shuts down ("xinit: cannot kill server") and I cannot login from any other vty, forcing me to press reset. Gotta love Xorg updates :)

Without polkitd it seems to work ok. I've inserted this line in the Application Autostart of XFCE settings

setxkbmap -layout "us,gr" -option "grp:ctrl_shift_toggle"

which enables me to switch between English and Greek (essentially what I already had in xorg.conf previously)

I am using XFCE 4.6 too.

Cheers,

Manoli

#3 Re: Good experiences with X.Org autoconfiguration

Added on 2009-04-20T13:56 by Sec

If you want your keyboad language to be set by hald, you can create a matching .fdi file. See my blog entry at http://blogmal.42.org/tidbits/xorg-hald.story for the details.

#4 Re: Good experiences with X.Org autoconfiguration

Added on 2009-04-21T16:54 by am

Mouse and keyboard configuration could be done with HAL. Place keyb.fdi in /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy containing something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
  <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
  <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">pl</merge>
  <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbModel" type="string">logiultrax</merge>
  </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

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