Re: [gentoo-user] How the HAL are you supposed to use these files?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
>> Please, somebody, tell me all this HAL stuff is straightforwardly
>> explained in an easily accessible Gentoo document, so that I can hang my
>> head in shame and apologise for the noise!  ;-)
>
> I believe you'll be hearing from Dale in the near future. :)
>
> HAL-in-xorg-in-a-nutshell: If you're using an ordinary desktop system,
> you shouldn't need to manually do anything. Just run X as usual and it
> should work.

While I think this is what people believe, I must point out that for
it work automatically the system needs to be supported by whatever
version of drivers support the graphics device in the system.

I just got a DH55HC motherboard with the i5-661 processor which does
some or most of the VGA function. For that device to be discovered and
run automatically I would have had to use stuff that's marked ~amd64
which I generally don't do and in this case didn't because it became a
waterfall of things getting unmasked.

So, if you're supported it will work. If you're not because this is
new hardware then you still need xorg.conf.

Cheers,
Mark