I had some feedback from at least two readers who could not enable SHMConfig, and when they tried to use gsynaptics or syndaemon, they were met with the error “You have to set ‘SHMConfig’ ‘true’ in xorg.conf or XF86Config“. The instructions provided in the post to enable SHMConfig using the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi method did not appear to be working.

After a lot of troubleshooting work with Travis, we were able to determine why this was occuring, and how to resolve it.

Firstly, and briefly, the why. The HAL daemon (hald) keeps a cache in /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache. For some reason, hald was using this cache file, and not picking up the newly created shmconfig.fdi file.

Now the important part – how to resolve it! This is easy, you just need to remove the cache:

sudo rm /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache

Provided you have created the shmconfig.fdi file as described in the gsynaptics post, reboot your machine, and you should be able to load gsynaptics and setup syndaemon without being told SHMConfig needs to be set to true. The fdi-cache file will be recreated when you reboot, and you shouldn’t have any more problems.

A big thanks to Travis for helping to troubleshoot this one!

I used unetbootin to create a bootable USB drive, and it booted to an Ubuntu/gOS boot menu fine. I didn’t want to overwrite my UNR install, so I chose to boot ‘live’ – i.e. run gOS from the USB drive, and not change my hard drive in any way.

The kogan spash screen appeared and eventually it booted to the ‘koganised’ gOS desktop, which only lasted a day the last time it was installed on my agora! What I didn’t have, semi-unexpectedly, was a functioning touchpad.

Unless the fixgOS2.bat or makeboot.bat files described in the manual do something other than copy the gOS iso to the USB drive and make it bootable (I couldn’t use the method described in the agora’s manual, as I do not have windows installed), than I don’t think the factory restore instructions will help you to easily restore the kogan to its original out-of-the-box self.

I would love to be proved wrong though, and would love it if someone could follow the instructions on page 36 of the manual, create a USB drive with the kogan gOS image boot live to gOS (this will not erase any data currently on your agora’s hard disk) and see if the touchpad works. Any takers? You may be the first to crack the touchpad mystery of the kogan agora!