# Two days of HAL and DBUS slapping around my USB mouse like tom and jerry. Enough.



## inurneck (Dec 27, 2009)

Hello world,
 I have been playing around with getting X and its input devices stable, in the middle of this whole new irritating HAL movement everyone including myself is annoyed over and decided the right way to go is to dive in and follow the lead and have hal and dbus enabled rather than finding some hack and do it the wrong way. No sense fighting it. And in fifteen years of using FreeBSD i have been thru far worse believe me. I dont know if you remember it but I used to run UnixHideout back in the day. Anyway it has been a small headache. Two days actually. Using this site and many other resources on the net I have been able to get it working and somewhat stable on my own. Heres what tends to happen, although I have been in X about an hour and am writing this post from it, all seems to be fine for the moment. But what happens sooner or later is the mouse just drops. It vaporizes. Falls completely unresponsive. Sometimes it happens quick, sometimes it takes an hour or more I don't know how to replicate it. The only way to "Repair it" is to kill X and reboot. Im not running a moused daemon so I dont know how to restart it even though I can get command access. Is there a way to restart it? If its not a moused daemon that starts it, what is? I guess im not clear on how two different environments can start the mouse. I posted what I believe to be most if not all of the information you need below, if you need anything else ask and i'll post it here as soon as i can get it to you. Oh I tried two different USB mice. The first was a dell for this machine it was a USB mouse with a ball, and now im using a microsoft OPTICAL BLUE USB mouse that says it has ps/2 compatibility dont know if that helps. Both do the same thing. Thanks.

#Machine is a Dell PowerEdge 2400 server w/ Scsi, raid enabled all the latest firmware updates, I played with the bios everything seems to be fine in there.


```
[mike@daemon /etc/X11]$ uname -a
FreeBSD daemon 8.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Sat Nov 21 15:48:17 UTC 2009 [email]root@almeida.cse.buffalo.edu[/email]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
```

#Files of interest
#I included only the material I thought was relevant oppose to #pasting the entire file contents.

#/etc/X11/xorg.conf
#As you can see I removed all input devices for the upgrade. 
#The only other things in the file don't need to be listed.

```
Section "ServerFlags"
        Option         "AutoAddDevices" "True"
        Option         "AutoEnableDevices" "True"
        Option         "AllowEmptyInput" "True"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
EndSection
```

#/etc/rc.conf

```
usbd_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
```

#relevant dmesg output

```
usbus0: 12Mbps Full Speed USB v1.0
ugen0.1: <(0x1166)> at usbus0
uhub0: <(0x1166) OHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered
ugen0.2: <Microsoft> at usbus0
ums0: <Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with I, class 0/0, rev 1.10/3.00, addr 2> on usbus0
ums0: 3 buttons and [XYZ] coordinates ID=0
```

If there is anything else you need please let me know, and thank you for taking the time to read my post, and also in advance for any response you might have for me.


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## adamk (Dec 27, 2009)

inurneck said:
			
		

> Section "ServerFlags"
> Option         "AutoAddDevices" "True"
> Option         "AutoEnableDevices" "True"
> Option         "AllowEmptyInput" "True"
> EndSection



Just change that to:


```
Section "ServerFlags"
        Option         "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection
```

And define your Mouse and keyboard as InputDevices in xorg.conf and be done with HAL.  Besides, even the Xorg developers are dropping HAL for device management in future versions, so I'd hardly call that the "wrong way" 

Adam


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## inurneck (Dec 27, 2009)

Thanks for your quick reply. From some of the things I read, at least to my understanding I thought HAL and DBUS were the new way and were going to be implemented for good soon so I had may as well change now. I thought like many other new things developers throw in it's just rocky at first and I had accepted that. But I have been trying to get this to work the "new" way. Why would they throw this in, and screw us all up just to rip it out again. Am I missing something here? Is HAL and DBUS the movement or no? Thanks again.


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## adamk (Dec 27, 2009)

http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgHAL

Adam


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## inurneck (Dec 27, 2009)

Hmm. Seems I rushed right into getting this box up after not playing with FBSD for a while, and must have read some old documentation off google and got instantly tossed in the opposite path. Well.. the mouse hasn't died in quite a few hours. I'll see how it goes and tomorrow or whenever i'll bury HAL and DBUS. I'd be lying if I said after all this I wouldn't enjoy it.. curses incoherently. lol. Thanks.


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