On Wed, 2010-12-29 at 13:01 +0000, Mick wrote: > Personally, I can't see why all these additional config files and locations > are required, rather than a single /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I have found all > these > back and forth changes to fdi's, xorg.conf.d and what have you, unnecessary > and annoyingly time wasting. > > Of course I might have missed something simple in all this kerfuffle, so > please chime in if there is a better way around this.
If all you are worried about is making your touchpad work in X, and you're willing to pull it up in a text editor every time you need to make a change, then no, you didn't really miss anything. The purpose of xorg.conf.d is to allow packages/utilities/etc to drop in changes to your X config seamlessly, as in, without the user being required to take any specific action. For example, the synaptics input driver drops a 50-synaptics.conf file into your xorg.conf.d that includes a simple "this is a touchpad" configuration, which would take effect just by restarting X. The purpose of udev is to configure all of the hardware on your system, not just for X. It's how GNOME/KDE/whatever is able to automount your USB key when it shows up, and knows that /dev/sr0 is a dvd-rom drive, etc. Just as with HAL, using udev to configure X-specific options is probably overkill. In theory, other GUI systems besides X could just as easily read the x11 options from udev and use them. Since there isn't really any such alternative, the practical benefits of udev over a monolithic xorg.conf file mostly vanish. --Mike
