Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Fedora rawhide and X server input configuration

I've pushed the bits required to change from hal to udev for device discovery in the X server into rawhide today. Unfortunately, this means that existing configurations may break. Especially all custom fdi files will stop working as they merge their options into the information HAL provides to the server - but the server doesn't listen to HAL anymore. For the distribution-provided fdi files - they will move to the new format as packages are updated.

If you have fdi files in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/, please act now. We don't have a tool to automatically convert your custom fdi files into xorg.conf snippets, so unfortunately you'll have to do this manually. You can convert them now and leave the fdi files in place, they'll simply be ignored once the package is updated.

The new configuration format is the xorg.conf-style configuration with InputClasses. If you've updated already, the xorg.conf(5) manpage has more info or check out the Fedora wiki page for input device configuration.

3 comments:

Dan Nicholson said...

Noticed something on the wiki and in the fedora devel archives (stopped subscribing with the abysmal signal to noise). You're advocating /etc/xorg.conf{,.d}. That's perfectly acceptable to me, but people do traditionally expect /etc/X11/*.

If you do decide to stick with /etc/xorg.conf* as the default, you should at least head off some of the complainers that Xorg will search both places (in fact /etc/X11 first) if they want to do it that way. See xorg.conf(5).

Anyway, nice to see this hitting some actual users besides me, you and jcristau.

Unknown said...

So, just within the last few Fedora cycles, I've had to go from xorg.conf for my Tablet PC wacom setup, to custom.fdi files, and now back to xorg.conf??? You're just begging for more bug reports when this new "functionality" is released...

Anyway, thanks for the effort you're putting in to resolve my current woes with the xorg-x11-drv-wacom update...

Peter Hutterer said...

Andrew:
I admit that switching to HAL configuration was wrong and we shouldn't have done so. Unfortunately, this was how it worked out. So far the feedback has been relatively good though and people appreciate that xorg configuration now goes back into xorg-specific configuration formats and files.