I didn't want to derail the ongoing thread about hal/xorg with this question there.
Far as I remember I haven't done anything special concerning hal but at some point hal disappeared. And is not on my system anymore. I've always used and /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for starting X. What I'm wondering from seeing this kind of topic frequently here is if I'm running in some deprecated mode? If my setup using no hal, and xorg.conf is going to become outdated and stop working anytime soon?