problems with hal in freebsd 7.2 i386

[chrisa at uvic.ca]

> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, chrisa at uvic.ca wrote:
>
>>> My systems work well with hal. I find overall setup to be faster and
>>> smoother(at this point in time) with hal enabled although there is much
>>> adversity to it on this list.
>>>
>>> Do you have xf86-input-mouse installed?
>>
>> I do have it installed. I'm going to try manual configuration to see if
>> I
>> can make it work.
>
> If you can tell what graphics card you have, no doubt someone can
> provide a sample.  I can come up with ones for ATI and Intel.

It's a Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or something.
Built-in to the motherboard. That's what Xorg autodetects, anyway, and it
starts up and shows blackbox.

I ran Xorg -configure and started it with the result xorg.conf.new, and
that time the screen stayed black throughout. Odd.

>
>> By the way, you find it faster and smoother with hal enabled? I recall
>> reading an earlier thread about hal where some people found everything
>> slower and less responsive. Interesting.
>
> It turns out that hal plus a "disable hal" option makes things not work.
> The opposite is probably also true.

Interesting.

Anyhow, I looked at my Xorg.0.log. I noticed a line saying it can't find
any input devices, and relies upon hal to find them. Then I ran a ps -ax
and found that hal isn't running, even though it should be, being set to
start in rc.conf, along with dbus. So I started it, the startup script
appeared to work, but hald still isn't running. Then I started dbus first,
then hald, and they were both running, restarted X, and suddenly it works.

I swear both were running last night when the mouse and keyboard input
didn't work. They are, after all, set to start up at boot time. Also, the
most recent Xorg.0.log contains the lines:

(II) Cannot locate a core pointer device.
(II) Cannot locate a core keyboard device.
(II) The server relies on HAL to provide the list of input devices.
        If no devices become available, reconfigure HAL or disable
AllowEmptyInput.

even though the mouse and keyboard both work now. To make sure that it was
the most recent log file, I deleted all the Xorg logs, restarted it, and
read the most recent one. And it still contains those lines with the
working mouse and keyboard.

Thanks, all, for your help. Now I only have TWO problems left!