Touchpad, Hal, & X

When I first started setting up Gentoo on my laptop, my keyboard and mouse would freeze up whenever I started X (using Gnome or GDM). Unbeknownst to me, HAL actually does something for detecting hardware when X is started, and since HAL wasn't running my computer threw a fit. The simple fix was to make sure to start the HAL daemon on computer bootup.

The next issue I had was that my touchpad vertical and horizontal scrolling didn't work. I had already tried various things that I found online, but none of them made any difference. Using some other sites as reference, I put together my touchpad file for HAL that allows the scrolling to work. The file resides in "/etc/hal/fdi/policy". I called it "11-x11-synaptics.fdi". Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.touchpad">
     <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.VertEdgeScroll" type="string">true</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizEdgeScroll" type="string">true</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.protocol" type="string">auto-dev</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.shmconfig" type="string">true</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.VertScrollDelta" type="string">20</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizScrollDelta" type="string">20</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.LeftEdge" type="string">120</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.RightEdge" type="string">830</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.TopEdge" type="string">120</merge>
     <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomEdge" type="string">650</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>