# Question over /etc/rc.conf and hald_enable



## Jose Maldonado (Aug 24, 2015)

Hi everybody, I'm a newcomer at world of FreeBSD, for years I used Debian and Gentoo GNU/Linux, and now my new computer have a FreeBSD desktop with XFCE, and I'm very glad with this OS.

My question is for /etc/rc.conf and the option hald_enable="YES", in my readings over installing and configuration system, I can see this option in very occasions, but in others, I can read that this option is deprecated in favor of devd(4).

What it's true? Do I have to use this option ? 

Right now my system run without problem, networking, xorg, automount without issues.


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## wblock@ (Aug 24, 2015)

HAL was used for two important things, X input device detection so mice and keyboards could be connected while X was already running, and disk automount with xfce.  Then newer versions of xfce stopped using it for automount, and x11-servers/xorg-server was modified to use FreeBSD's devd(8) for input device autodetection.

So there is no need to run HAL for X or xfce any more.


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## Jose Maldonado (Aug 24, 2015)

Thanks for the clarification wblock@


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## troublemaker (Sep 5, 2015)

wblock@ said:


> HAL was used for two important things, X input device detection so mice and keyboards could be connected while X was already running, and disk automount with xfce.  Then newer versions of xfce stopped using it for automount, and x11-servers/xorg-server was modified to use FreeBSD's devd(8) for input device autodetection.
> 
> So there is no need to run HAL for X or xfce any more.


Wait, so how does it work with Gnome 3? I'm using:

```
gnome_enable="YES"
```
This starts hald(8) too if I understand correctly. Is it needed?


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## wblock@ (Sep 5, 2015)

Last I knew, both Gnome and KDE still required HAL.


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## protocelt (Sep 5, 2015)

FWIW, KDE4 can be built and runs fine without HAL support. You won't get automounting support, though it doesn't really work very dependably these days anyway and there are also some KDE applications like sysutils/k3b-kde4 that require it to work correctly. I'm really not sure about GNOME, but I think the last time I had installed it a few months back, it did indeed require HAL to function correctly.


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