I’ve installed Arch Linux on my desktop. I really like its philosophy and the high level of configurability. After the installation was complete I’ve extended my base system with xorg and kde. This was very easy with a package manager like pacman. I just executed pacman -S xorg kde.Though everything seemed to work I’ve noticed my X-server wasn’t able to handle input from my keyboard or mouse.

I have an nvidia 7600 graphics card and I’ve created my xorg.conf with nvidia-xconfig. Shit, still not any kind of input while the X-server shows up. Building a new xorg.conf with Xorg -configure gives the same result. I was in trouble, but then “let’s try HAL” (=hardware abstraction layer) came into my mind.

I’ve already mentioned the level of high configurability on Arch Linux. It works with a main configuration file, called rc.conf in the /etc directory. I simply added hal to my DAEMONS array.

6 root@archlinux $ cat /etc/rc.conf | grep DAEMONS
# DAEMONS
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs cron hal alsa kdm)

And I’ve deciced to combine this with a minimalistic xorg.conf file. Here you can see my /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Arch Linux is a great Linux distro. I like its philosophy, its principles, pacman (package management), ABS (Arch Build System) …
Whereas my desktop is running Arch, I’m still running Ubuntu on my notebook. Variation is nice. Oh yeah, I’m thinking about moving my server to Arch Linux as well.

phar0z