Ubuntu & dbus/hald/gconf/etc.

[Ben Scott]

Hi all,

  I've got to upgrade my home desktop distro (Fedora 8 being not
updated anymore) so I thought I'd give Ubuntu 8.10 a try.  After
trying the GNOME GUI overload thing for a few days, I once again
decided I Don't Like That, and went back to fvwm.  I then proceed to
disable the plague of daemons which had infected my system.

  I observe an interesting behavior: If "hald" is not running, then I
get no keyboard in X.

  Even the zap sequence (CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE) doesn't work.  I could
switch virtual consoles, though, so it was easy enough to restart the
hald (and dbus-daemon, which it depends on).

  So, my questions are:

A1. What the frak has gone wrong with Linux where even the frelling
*KEYBOARD* needs two daemons running?

A2. Is is practical to want to run Ubuntu without all these dameons,
or am I fighting the design assumptions of the system here?

A3. If the answer to A2 is "It is practical", anyone want to tell me
how, or point me at a writeup, etc.?

A4. If the answer to A2 is "It is NOT practical", anyone have some
advice on a distro that doesn't pervert everything good about Unix?

-- Ben