Severe X breakage heads up

[Bernardo Innocenti]

On 11/05/07 15:30, Adam Jackson wrote:

> This server will also introduce input hotplug support.  TBH I have no
> idea how this should be set up at the moment.  I'll try to get something
> working at least for the machines I have here, but that might only be
> good enough for static configuration same as F8 and earlier.  If someone
> wants to own the i-h part of this that'd be awesome, otherwise we'll get
> to it as we have time.

Maybe I could help here.  I added input hotplug support
for Xserver 1.4 on the OLPC not long ago.

The package changes are not in CVS because I'm still
overwhelmed by other urgent work, but all the srpms are
available for reference here:

  http://www.codewiz.org/pub/olpc-bernie/source/

Forgive me stuffing x11-input.fdi in the Xserver package
and installing it to /etc/hal/fdi.  That was just a kludge
to avoid modifying hal too.

It took me a while to get i-h right because I had no idea
what was needed, and I was also confused by longstanding
bugs in our kernel drivers, but in retrospect it didn't
take that much tweaking, at least for our fixed platform.

One non trivial change for Fedora would be moving the kbd
config away from xorg.conf.  Both Gnome and KDE can already
override the server settings through XKB.  The various
display managers, I'm afraid, don't do anything by default.
Same with startx.

The X server also supports receiving XKB configuration from
HAL, and Daniel Stone seems to think that a good design for a
fallback would be writing the default keyboard layout inside
a copy of x11-input.fdi and writing it to /etc/hal/fdi/.

We should also consider adjusting also system-config-keyboard
accordingly.

Also, I'm not sure if this is a good right time to do it, but
we may benefit from switching to evdev for mice and keyboards,
if only to put let that horrible /dev/input/mice and its
emulated PS/2 protocol rest in peace :-)


> I think those are the highlights.  If there are any further questions,
> please ask, I may have missed something.  If any bugs come up in the
> transition, please do file them!  We need to know what breaks so we know
> what we need to fix.  And of course, all patches and assistance are
> greatly appreciated.

That's great work.  I'm Looking forward to see it landing on
rawhide!

My only rawhide machine is a G4 laptop at home, and my time
to contribute is very limited.  So I can't do much more
than testing and answering questions on IRC.

-- 
 \___/
 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/