Unhappy Xorg upgrade

[Matt Dawson]

On Sunday 01 February 2009 14:37:32 Alex Goncharov wrote:
> he laptop has a touch pad, which is reasonable to assume to be
> "synaptics" -- but I don't use the pad (I've physically covered it,
> and use only the "pointing stick" in the middle of the keyboard);
> during one my experiments I also disabled the thing in BIOS.
>
> And: I have never used the xf86-input-synaptics driver.
>
> Is this something to think about -- what is the role of this driver?
> Can the lack of it bring the storm of bogus key events with wrong scan
> codes?

Just tried dropping the synaptics driver and option in loader.conf (it needs 
hw.psm.synaptics_support in /boot/loader.conf or it gets picked up as an 
Intellimouse) and it works as a standard mouse. The keyboard is still fine 
with no spurious events. The synaptics driver opens up a lot of features on 
the trackpad (right hand side becomes a scroll "wheel", the bottom edge 
becomes a horizontal scroll, it picks up multi-taps and you can tweak much of 
it in xorg.conf) but I don't think this is the cause of your issue.

FYI, this laptop is an ECS 331, RS485 chipset with a Turion ML34 CPU running 
7-STABLE amd64 from Jan 12th.

If anyone's interested (on x11@), I did just plug a USB mouse in and it Just 
Worked [TM] without me having to mess with anything.

> | Which brings me to another little niggle: <aside> Has anyone on list
> | noticed that statically compiling a keymap in your kernel >7.0-RELEASE
> | ends up with the US layout in single user mode regardless? This used to
> | work, but now it doesn't, unless I've missed something in NOTES
> | somewhere. </aside>
>
> I can't comment on it -- but why to do it: why not to use the xkb
> extensions (Option "XkbLayout" "gb" -- or something of that sort)?

This was a general question to stable@ since I use the console a lot on 
servers and this used to stop me putting things like securelevel_enable=@YES@ 
into rc.conf and rebooting without noticing what I'd done, then engaging in 
percussive maintenance because it refuses to boot ;o)
-- 
Matt Dawson
MTD15-RIPE
matt at chronos.org.uk