Ubuntu & dbus/hald/gconf/etc.

[Stephen Ryan]

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 08:48 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> 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?


hald is (among other things) a functional replacement for xorg.conf; it
handles input devices being added and removed on the fly, or being
renumbered after every boot as the USB protocol is wont to do.  Assuming
that you don't have USB input devices so you're not affected by those
problems, you could just recreate xorg.conf yourself and make sure your
keyboard and mouse are properly listed, just like you used to do in the
Good Old Days(tm).


Disclaimer:  I only have USB input devices and hald solves a real
problem for me.  I'm not going to try this one.