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How to disable harddrake [solved]


neddie
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The "tapping" on my laptop's touchpad drives me crazy (moving my cursor when I brush it while typing), so I disable the tapping by editing xorg.conf. Then in the past, harddrake always used to rewrite my xorg.conf on boot, wiping my changes and re-enabling the touchpad tapping. So I had to remember to disable harddrake too to keep the touchpad tapping off.

 

Now with 2009.0, I edit my xorg.conf as before, and the tapping is disabled, but I can't disable harddrake because I can't find it listed in mcc. So next time I reboot the tapping is enabled again. Is harddrake running but not listed, or is it something else now which is rewriting my xorg.conf? How can I stop xorg.conf from being rewritten?

Edited by neddie
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I'm not sure if it's the same, but:

 

chkconfig --list | grep -i hard

 

to see if there is a service listed here. Or just do a simple listing of all:

 

chkconfig --list | grep :on

 

and see if there is anything enabled on all services that might relate to harddrake. There always used to be a service for it - I don't even remember checking it in 2009.0 to see if it existed. I remember also, that harddrake when it was disabled then had problems automatically identifying and mounting removable media although now that should all be handled by udev/hald and so shouldn't be a problem to disable the service now.

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Neddie, you could always make it a read only file.
Good idea! But I tried it, and it didn't work. It got changed to rw permissions for root and then got rewritten again.

 

chkconfig --list | grep -i hard
Nope, nothing comes back. Seems like harddrake really isn't running. I have haldaemon, but that's something else, right?

 

I remember also, that harddrake when it was disabled then had problems automatically identifying and mounting removable media although now that should all be handled by udev/hald and so shouldn't be a problem to disable the service now.
I've been disabling it for ages (to keep the touchpad tapping switched off) and haven't had any problems with removable media mounting. :unsure:

 

Anyone know what might be rewriting my xorg.conf file for me if it's not harddrake this time?

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How can I stop xorg.conf from being rewritten?

If you're using an ext3 file system, you could try using chattr to add the 'i' file attribute. As root do

chattr +i /etc/X11/xorg.conf

then it shouldn't change until you remove that attribute.

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If you're using an ext3 file system, you could try using chattr to add the 'i' file attribute.
I think the root partition is ext2. mcc says it's "linux native" which is ext2 I think.

 

Are there any other processes like harddrake which might want to "helpfully" rewrite my xorg.conf for me?

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OK, I'm guessing that you're not happy with my suggestions, so I've created a fix for you. Do this

[greg@apus ~]$ rpm -qa | grep -i synaptics
x11-driver-input-synaptics-0.15.2-1mdv2009.0
gsynaptics-0.9.14-3.1mdv2009.0

remove everything that isn't on that list, and install only what I have. Make sure your xorg.conf is not modified with your edits. Reboot the system, and in a terminal (as user) do

gsynaptics

uncheck the 'Enable Tapping' button. Now you have no touchpad tapping input at all. If you like this you could add it to you menu with your menu editor, and turn it on or off at will.

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It's not that I don't like your suggestions, Greg! It's just that I'm trying out scarecrow's suggestion first, and I want to make sure that it really isn't being rewritten any more (it depends whether the USB trackball is plugged in at boot time, it seems.

But let me answer the questions one by one:

I also expected "urpme harddrake" to pull out something important too, but it didn't. And it seems to have really fixed the problem. Thanks, scarecrow! I was coming to the conclusion that it wasn't harddrake doing the rewriting, but maybe harddrake just runs at boot and doesn't run as a continual service any more? Just a guess. Whatever, I couldn't find it running but urpme'ing it seemed to stop it from doing whatever it was doing! :thumbs:

 

About Xorg.0.log, good suggestion, I didn't know about that file, but by the looks of it it's just written by X when it loads. So it all looks fine, because it was another program which rewrote the xorg.conf file.

 

I haven't tried gsynaptics because the problem seems to be fixed now, but out of interest I had a look at my rpms and just found "synaptics-0.14.7-0.20070706.3mdv2009.0" - no gsynaptics. I'm guessing that's a gnome config tool but it didn't get installed for me when I installed Gnome One.

 

I don't know if the chattr thing would have fixed it, but I thought it would be cleaner to stop the culprit from running, rather than let it run and fail (perhaps messily).

 

Thanks for all your suggestions though! :D

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harddrake should be obsoleted-removed for good.

After all, all it does is precisely what hal, policykit and evdev are doing the "politically correct" way (in compliance with the freedesktop.org specs, that is).

At first I was very reluctant to use evdev/policykit (considering it an evil thing coming right from the retarded brain of mr. Shuttleworth...), but after all, it may not be 100% mature yet, but it DOES work if set properly, and I guess it will be the future standard for ANY distro. So... I accepted it, and I'm using it, with just minor regressions.

Edited by scarecrow
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