Linux Wizard

I do remember when less than 2 years ago we had to handle the HAL support in xorg.conf ... This was painful as there were several issues :

• HAL need to be started or else you may end up without mouse and keyboard
• By default HAL setting up a US keyboard layout ( QWERTY )
• There was the need to find a way to configure the keyboard layout, and HAL dev was reluctant to put this in the FDI files are users are not supposed to mess up with HAL fdi file
• We end up putting keyboard layout to another file ... /etc/sysconfig/keyboard

Now that everything is stable and most distribution integrate this well ... please be aware of the fact that ... Xorg will be dropping HAL support in Xorg 1.8. So at the end, Xorg will be using more platform specific code ( libudev, libdevinfo, ... ) as neither DeviceKit or udisk will provide the previous HAL functionnality. To ease Xorg configuration, /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d will be also add to Xorg.

I do regret HAL as it was allowing to abstract the device detection and enumeration on Linux, thus allowing application dev to use higher level API instead of having to know low level details. However it's true that HAL was having performances issues on large system, and many embedded products were not using HAL. I do hope however that this will be the last big change in Linux : there's a need for a kind of stability in the platform !