Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Over the last couple of years I've been leading a somewhat itinerant lifestyle and have been mainly relying on products from the House of Jobs for my UNIXoid computing needs. Consequently I haven't been keeping up with the latest developments in desktop Linux, and having just had the opportunity to set up a brand-new PC with Xubuntu, I'm suffering a little bit of culture shock: for some reason everything "just worked". It basically installed itself with no manual editing of configuration files necessary.

However, in Xubuntu there doesn't seem to be a simple, mouse-based way of mapping the goddam awful CAPSLOCK key to CTRL. No problem, I thought. Just let me get at /etc/X11/XF86Config /etc/X11/xorg.conf with a handy text editor, just like in the good old days. Weird. Not much in there, is there? A bit of poking around online reveals that HAL appears to have taken over, and my PC is trying to eject me from the pod bays into the vacuum of space. No, scratch that, HAL stands for "Hardware Abstraction Layer" and is something nifty which takes care of the nasty business of different sorts of hardware devices being plugged in. It also provides the capability to create XML configuration files modifying the behaviour of attached devices, such as the keyboard. The place to do this is in the directory /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ and the file can have any name, provided it ends in .fdi. 

For setting the caps lock key to CTRL the following appears to work:

X.org needs to be restarted for the configuration to take effect. (Some sources indicated restarting the hal daemon will cause the new settings to be registered, but this didn't work for me.)

Note that HAL is scheduled for replacement (which might explain repeated "I can't let you do that, Dave" entries in /var/log/messages) by something called DeviceKit, which will be even niftier (though quite possibly requiring a totally different style of configuration.

Posted at 2:10 PM |Comments (0)