Bug#547143: xserver-xorg: xorg/evdev/HAL versus serial mouse
Julien Cristau wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 09:48:53 +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
[...]
>> Note that just disabling HAL and AutoAddDevices wasn't enough - I've
>> had to put lots more lines back in my xorg.conf that I'd previously
>> been leaving to the defaults. Many thanks for providing
>> /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg/examples/xorg.conf!
>
> That's weird. I'd have expected that disabling AutoAddDevices would
> make things work with the old xorg.conf InputDevice section (once that
> is done, keeping hal running or stopping it shouldn't make a
> difference).
This machine's due to be decommissioned soon anyway, so I'm hurrying
through some more tests while it's still available. I've switched
to a standard Debian kernel in case there are any driver issues.
Summarised findings:
--------------------
* I was getting interference from a buggy display manager
* other display managers (or startx) allow hal+serialmouse
* hal, the kbd driver, and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace interact badly
Details:
--------
The first thing I tried was disabling my display manager,
de-lobotomising HAL and running startx. This works!
Well, except that DontZap appears to be in effect, contrary to my
instructions. Yes, I edited the xorg.conf and reconfigured
console-setup and restarted hal and rebooted for luck. Still
nothing. But that's only a mild annoyance for now.
It's only when I use wdm that everything goes haywire. My first ten
tries go like this:
* wdmLogin seems happy then segfaults halfway through launching a
session, spewing some really strange syslog messages.
* Works perfectly.
* Works perfectly.
* An amusing failure mode where my attempt to enter a username
results in it doing that "shaking the box to indicate a
wrong password" thing that gets more and more frenzied until
it crashes.
* Works except that it doesn't recognise the Enter key. Useless.
Where's my goddamn Ctrl-Alt-Backspace?!
* Works perfectly.
* Works perfectly.
* Segfaults on the middle letter of my username.
* Logs me in rather slowly, but otherwise works.
* Works perfectly.
Plain xdm works fine too. So it looks as if switching from wdm to
xdm would let me keep hal running on this hardware... if I had some
reason to want hal.
Now, if I temporarily move my xorg.conf out of the way and rely on
the defaults (and hal), then startx, xdm, and wdm all work equally
well. The resolution's hopeless, the serial mouse is missing, but
nothing segfaults, I've got a GB keymap, and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
works. Hmmm.
Whoops! On my last try of ten, wdmLogin segfaults with a rush of
nasty kernel errors about secondary DMA buffers. So wdm seems to be
just plain flaky, and I should go and submit a proper bugreport for
it.
--
JBR
Ankh kak! (Ancient Egyptian blessing)
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