On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 23:25 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Monday 18 January 2010 22:47:05 Dale wrote: > > In that case, ctrl alt F1 does nothing. You also need to understand > > that most people don't even know how to use SysRq keys. I didn't and > > had to do a hard shutdown. I had to actually pull the plug to do any > > good. Luckily I knew how to get it to boot into single user mode so I > > could disable hal otherwise I would be right back on the same screen > > again with no mouse or keyboard. It would be really bad if even that > > didn't work with devicekit. I'm not sure how it couldn't but we never > > know do we? > > Dale's experiences highlight a very important and very fundamental rule of > desktop system design: > > As a developer you must completely and totally guarantee to the full limit of > what is feasible, that the user will always have a usable keyboard, mouse and > display after the desktop has launched. You can fallback to VGA resolution > and > the most basic keyboard layout possible if you need to, but you must give the > user something and never leave them stranded. Anything else is just an epic > fail.
My 2c worth is this: In any other distribution, the xorg/hal update would have been configured so that Dale's (sorry to keep using you as an example :) keyboard / mouse was working. But this is Gentoo. You ARE the distributor AND the end user. Conflicts in libraries / packages are up to you to resolve. About 3-4 people use Gentoo at work, and at least 2 were hit by the keyboard/mouse not working bug in xorg when it moved to HAL. With a bit of fuddling, remerging, and so on, we got it working in both cases. So yes, the developer must give a fallback method of using the keyboard / mouse, but not against the incorrectly packaged / configured system. In Gentoo you often end up with an incorrect system, hence revdep-rebuild and so on. -- Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au> It's more than magnificent-it's mediocre. -Samuel Goldwyn
