No keyboard after ports update, 2x moused_enable="YES" culprit

[Lars Eighner]

On Sat, 14 May 2011, Rob Clark wrote:

> After restarting X, prior to any reboot, I lost the mouse in X.
> So I figured a reboot was in order.

This is almost certainly HAL.  If you do not know you need HAL for
something, mark the hal and hal-info ports FORBIDDEN (set FORBIDDEN to any
value in the Makefiles) whenever you update your ports tree.  Grep /var/db/ports
for hal and then remove the with hal option in the affected ports using make
config.  Force reinstall the affected ports.  Try to pkg_delete hal, to check
for dependencies you haven't resolved.  When all the dependencies are
removed, then remove hal.

> Some digging around revealed that I had the following line in /etc/rc.conf
> twice: moused_enable="YES"
>
> I removed one of these (which I guess was the culprit) and left one as it
> should have been, then all was well.  Keyboard found at reboot, no further
> issues -- mouse was available in X too.
>
> I have no idea why I had  moused_enable="YES"  in there twice, whether it
> was from an old or recent rc.conf edit, but it clearly seems to have been
> causing the issue.

This cannot be.  Once or a million times should have exactly the same
effect.  Commonly ports, people, and sysinstall just add stuff to the end of
this file.  They add everything they know they need because only the last of
similar entries has effect.  rc.conf can become unwieldly over time because
of this.  It is safe to delete duplicate entries, but that should not affect
the result.  When the same value is assigned differing values only the last
is effective.  The defaults are in /etc/defaults/rc.conf which should never
be edited.


-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266