Effing HAL

[Adam Vande More]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Freminlins <freminlins at gmail.com> wrote:

> For Christ's sake. I have an IBM X41 laptop, which was happily running
> FreeBSD 7.1. Having a little free time this evening I decided to update it
> to 7.2. The upgrade failed miserably so I had to install from scratch. But
> that's OK, because I had backed up the machine beforehand.
>
> The install went through fine (via NFS after PXE boot - no CDROM on this
> box). And then I get to X. As this is a minor update I go to use the old
> Xorg config which worked fine. No joy. I get the dreaded "No screens found"
> error, although the screen is there of course. After trying X -configure
> several times, tweaking, etc., I get nowhere slowly. i810 is now just
> intel,
> but whatever. The screen comes up, but no mouse or keyboard. After yet much
> more fiddling and tweaking I finally get to the crux of the problem:
> fricking HAL.
>
> Having installed this from scratch using the X User defaults I might have
> expected that something that is now required to get the flipping keyboard
> and mouse working would be enabled by the installer. But no, I have to
> waste
> time on this crap just to get back to where I was before. Oh, and HAL uses
> 6MB or so of RAM. Not a lot. But as I already specify the hardware in the
> Xorg conf file it is, as far as I can see, an unnecessary waste.
>
> I thought it would be easy, but no, it's just a pain. It's wasn't
> unsolvable, as I have years of fiddling with UNIX and FreeBSD in
> particular.
> But for effing Christ's sake.
>
> I know this isn't specifically a FreeBSD problem, HAL being needed by X.
> But
> the flipping installer should enable it when I selected X flipping User
> from
> the install options.
>
> My little upgrade has now turned from a bit of fun into a saga that I don't
> want to go through again.
>
> I had to get this off my chest. It was, as they say, doing my head in.
>
> MF.
> _______________________________________________
>
>
HAL dependency is a knob in xorg-server port.
-- 
Adam Vande More