If you are not a regular follower of the Sidux or Debian forums, you might get bitten by this one.

The problem apparently is not related to the current Sid upgrade of Hal, but that upgrade exposes a bug in xserver-xorg-input-evdev

Before upgrading Hal ...

# aptitude remove xserver-xorg-input-evdev

... That will take xserver-xorg-input-all with it, but leave xserver-xorg-input-kbd and xserver-xorg-input-mouse (and presumably any other individual active input devices) in place.

xserver-xorg-input-evdev evidently provides some kind of priority handling for the various input devices, but removing it has not had any obvious negative effect on my system.

Well that may explain why my keyboard layout has gone all ape-sh...

I think ...
# aptitude remove xserver-xorg-input-evdev
... and restart X will fix it.

I had an issue with xorg and kde over the weekend on 2 machines running Sid, but a dist-upgrade solved it both times. A little extreme, but at least it worked!

Peace,
JimBass

It did, thank you.