Is KDE 4.4.5 on FreeBSD 8.1 this bad?

[Michel Talon]

I wrote:

> Of course making X to run was an exercise in pain, i had to enable HAL
> and DBUS otherwise keyboard and mouse were not recognized, the data in
> the xorg.conf were not obeyed, etc. but this was to be expected. The
> only problem i have now is that i have seen no way to configure the
> kdm greeter so that the french keyboard is recognized as french, which
> is inconvenient to type the passwd.


For reference the solution i have found is to modify some hald config
file this way:

cat /usr/local/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-x11-input.fdi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>

    <!-- KVM emulates a USB graphics tablet which works in absolute
coordinate mode -->
    <match key="input.product" contains="QEMU USB Tablet">
       <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
    </match>

    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.tablet">
      <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name"
             string="Linux">
        <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
      </match>
    </match>

    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keyboard">
      <!-- If we're using Linux, we use evdev by default (falling back to
           keyboard otherwise). -->
      <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">kbd</merge>
      <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.kernel.name"
             string="Linux">
        <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
      </match>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbModel" type="string">pc105</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.XkbLayout" type="string">fr</merge>
    </match>

  </device>
</deviceinfo>

The modification is to add the two lines with pc105 and fr at the end
which provide a fall back for non Linux systems.

Then X starts with a french keyboard and kdm sees it. By the way to
start kdm automatically, the solution is in the FreeBSD KDE4 wiki, it is
simply to add the following to /etc/rc.conf

local_startup="${local_startup} /usr/local/kde4/etc/rc.d"
kdm4_enable="YES"

Hope this may help some poor fellow who has not followed the recent
modifications to xorg configuration closely, modifications which can be
summarized as: "Why do it simple when one can do it complex?".




-- 

Michel TALON