Yesterday I dropped the superfluous hal dependency from gparted, today I uploaded gdm to stop using hal for getting the keyboard layout and use libxklavier instead.

I also applied Julian Cristau’s udevified X.org branch to our xorg-edgers packages into my halsectomy PPA, created some udev rules for udev-based X.org input detection ([1], [2]), and off we go: that was the last hal reverse dependency. My system now fully boots and works without hal.

Hooray!

Now I just need to hassle David Zeuthen to apply the patches soon. Of course I couldn’t wait and already uploaded them to Karmic, so please test the hell out of it and let me know about problems.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Halsectomy is a little greener once again.

I started a discussion with upstream about how to migrate the libgphoto bits away from hal to udev rules. It shoulnd’t actually be hard to do, and I’m keen on working on it, but it needs agreement between the libgphoto, udev-extras, and gvfs/KDE upstreams, so some coordination work is in order.

I also created a wiki page of the current migration status. Please edit if I forgot something. If you feel inclined to work on a particular bit, the Linux world will heavily appreciate this! It’s still a major Karmic goal to push the transition as far as possible, to avoid intrusive system changes for Ubuntu 10.04 (which is likely to become an LTS).

A few days ago I wondered what the replacement of hal-setup-keymap would be. This is the bit that makes your laptop’s magic Fn keys work, such as “brightness up”, “next song”, “WWW browser”. I became quite acquainted with this component in the last six months and committed a fair share of fixes to hal-info for those. A quick discussion revealed that nobody was working on this, so I picked that up and created a tool to convert hal keymap .fdi files to udev rules and keymap files, and an udev-extra git branch with those maps, the udev rules, and a small callout which pokes the maps into the corresponding evdev device whenever an input device gets added.

I tested it on my Dell Latitude D430, and it works just fine. Dell laptops are all alike in terms of Fn keys, but I need testing on other laptops. I’m particularly interested in the Sony and ThinkPad models, which don’t send “magic” keys as high keycodes on
a standard i8042 atkbd, but as low keycodes on a separate input device (30-keymap-module-* in hal-info). Testing on Acer and Fujitsu models is also highly welcome.

For testing, add my PPA and do


$ sudo apt-get install udev-extras
# disable the current hal-info keymaps:
$ sudo rm /usr/share/hal/fdi/*/*/30-keymap-*


Packages are available for Jauny and Karmic.

Then reboot, and check if your magic Fn keys still work. Please send success and failure reports by private mail or as comments here. I’ll fix the issues and send a conclusion back here in a few days. If things don’t work for you, please do


$ sudo true
$ sudo udevadm monitor --udev -e > /tmp/udev.log 2>&1
$ sudo udevadm trigger --subsystem-match=input
$ fg
# press Control-C
$ grep . /sys/class/dmi/id/* 2>/dev/null


Please send the output of the last command, and /tmp/udev.log.

If you need to revert, purge udev-extras again and do sudo apt-get install --reinstall hal-info.

Many thanks in advance!

Update (2009-05-09): I got my kernel.org account now, and testing showed a lot of positive and no negative results. Thank you for all your feedback! I pushed the changes to udev master now.

2009-11-01 update:Updated git link from udev-extras (which got removed recently) to udev (where it was merged into a while ago).

DeviceKit and DeviceKit-power themselves are available for a while in Jaunty’s universe, but installing them by themselves is pretty boring, of course.

Last Saturday I packaged the new gnome-power-manager 2.25.x which is now devkit-ified and doesn’t use hal any more. It is now available in the ubuntu-desktop PPA. Please try it, break it, and complain over there

It works quite well for me, the only thing I noticed is that it currently seems to break my hibernate hotkey. Still investigating..