neddie Posted May 21, 2009 Report Share Posted May 21, 2009 (edited) 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 May 25, 2009 by neddie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted May 21, 2009 Report Share Posted May 21, 2009 Neddie, you could always make it a read only file. The only time it needs to be writable is for configuration. I think. :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted May 21, 2009 Report Share Posted May 21, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted May 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 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 hardNope, 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted May 23, 2009 Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted May 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted May 23, 2009 Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 #urpme harddrake or does it want to remove half the system with it? 2009.0 is using xorg-server 1.4.3, so the xorg.conf settings are respected (contrary to xorg-server 1.5.X+). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted May 23, 2009 Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 The chattr command should also work on ext2. I only know of harddrake and Xfdrake that might rewrite that file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted May 24, 2009 Report Share Posted May 24, 2009 Have you looked in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for any clues as to what is rewriting xorg.conf? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted May 25, 2009 Report Share Posted May 25, 2009 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted May 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 25, 2009 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! 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted May 26, 2009 Report Share Posted May 26, 2009 (edited) 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 May 26, 2009 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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