Effing HAL

[Freminlins]

2009/10/29 Paul Schmehl <pschmehl_lists at tx.rr.com>

> Far be it from me to pile on when you're already so frustrated, but I run
> into these sorts of problems myself from time to time.  It's usually because
> I didn't bother to read /usr/ports/UPDATING first, which in this case might
> have warned you.
>


Yeah, thanks for that. I knew about that file, but don't often read it.
There's even more to the saga - Xkblayout doesn't work. This whole HAL thing
stinks horribly. IF X is built with HAL basically certain options specified
in xorg.conf no longer work. HAL thinks it knows best. But it doesn't, cos
it's broken.

What really gets my goat about this is that things that used to work, and
people understand how they worked and how they were configured, no longer
work. And I'm 18MB of RAM worse off into the bargain.

There's a thread about other people's experience here:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=10924#post10924. One of the posts
contains these words "I've been fighting this one for two days now, and
still don't have a fully working system." That's seriously nasty for anyone.

The whole Xorg thing, at least on FreeBSD, is just a minefield. I like to
remove unnecessary packages, to save space for when I do backups. I don't
have an Nvidia card on this box so:

pkg_delete xf86-video-nv-2.1.13
pkg_delete: package 'xf86-video-nv-2.1.13' is required by these other
packages
and may not be deinstalled:
xorg-drivers-7.4_1
xorg-7.4_1

Great. So what is the point in having a separate package if I can't remove
that damn thing? I know I can pkg_delete -f, but why make it hard?


> Paul Schmehl, Senior Infosec Analyst


MF