Saturday, January 17, 2009

USB Keyboard and mouse stopped working upon upgrade to Xorg 1.5, new setting needed

My manpage says:
"If enabled, don't add the standard keyboard and mouse drivers, if there are no
input devices in the config file. Enabled by default if AutoAddDevices and
AutoEnableDevices is enabled, otherwise disabled."
I'll add another line warning about the disabling of mouse/kbd devices to the
man page.

Anyway, the semantics are:

AllowEmptyInput is on:
- if there are no input devices in xorg.conf, don't do anything.
- ignore devices in xorg.conf that use the kbd and mouse driver (new)

AllowEmptyInput is off:
- add all devices listed in the xorg.conf
- if no devices are listed in the xorg.conf, add a default pointer + keyboard
(/dev/console and /dev/input/mice usually)

On top of that, you have AutoAddDevices and AutoEnableDevices, who decide if
devices listed by HAL should be added. The common defaults is for all three to
be true, or (if HAL isn't an option for some reason) for all three to be false.