# hal not starting in diskless setup



## pacija (Sep 24, 2012)

Hi everyone,

I am successfully booting over PXE into XFCE4 desktop, but I have problems with hal, which is not starting, therefore not adding keyboard and mouse automatically when xorg.conf is not present.

Just for the test I recompiled xorg-server without hal and set AutoAddDevices on in xorg.conf, and in this setup my test machine works well. However, this does not solve my production problem because I have ~100 machines with different hardware configurations (video cards, mouses, keyboards etc.), and I would rather avoid creating dhcp reservations and /conf/default/IP.ADD.RE.SS/etc/X11/xorg.conf for all of them.

Any idea how to make hal work in PXE diskless setup?


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## ChalkBored (Sep 24, 2012)

Have you tried simply not having an xorg.conf and letting Xorg figure the hardware out on it's own?


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## pacija (Sep 24, 2012)

Of course, that is my goal. Without xorg.conf my videocard gets probed well, but things that need hal (mouse and keyboard) are not recognized.


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## wblock@ (Sep 24, 2012)

If you built xorg-server without HAL, that's effectively the same as setting AutoAddDevices off.

xorg-server does not need it.  Keyboards, even multiple and hot-attached keyboards, just work.  Unless you've disabled kbdmux(4), maybe.  Mice are automatically detected.  USB mice go through devd(8), so it should be enabled and have a standard devd.conf(5).


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## pacija (Sep 26, 2012)

Indeed, moused_enable and recompiling xorg without hal made my mouse work, which was my main goal.

As for hal, it needs /var/cache/hald/ directory, as well as some dirs in /var/lib in order to start. Hopefully I will have time to investigate which exactly they are, and if so I will post them later.


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