Well, it all started with my wife getting me a belkin n52te, and a razer anansi. I wasn't able to get them working without HAL, so I did a lot of looking around, and actually got a partially working HAL policy for the razer anansi but couldn't set the programable keys - in the end I ended up returning both. It probably would have ended there...
However, I noticed a friend of mine also had the n52te, and he runs one of the *too's - it works fine for him. So in talking to him it turned out he just recompiled the xorg server and kde versions which use udev from "the standard overlay" and this combination automagically made it work. Now I haven't used any of the gentoo based systems so from the little I understand that is supposed to be their version of the ports system.
Anyhow, thats when the green-eye'd daemon started.
I realize that its probably possible to make the above hardware work in FreeBSD with/without HAL and its likely I just can't discern how to do it irrespective of what version of Xorg is used. But it still tweaks my adrenals a little bit that he's got it running in linux without any issues and I can't yet test out if I could do the same yet on FBSD.
Now granted I'm not really great at online games, so maybe I should take up looking kittens - that metamucil bath sounds pretty invigorating. However the main point I wanted to express is that I wish I could achieve that calm/laid-back attitude everyone else has around here and not get competitive when friends show off about being able to do something I just can't seem to make work.