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.