Comment 26 for bug 282203

fdi file is a hal policy file that tells hal to tell Xorg about your tablet you just plugged in. its located at /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-wacom.fdi

You had the X configured in Hardy and you did a dist-upgrade? That means you have done this before and you had a working X configuration from there. It should be usable with minimal change. Without knowing what went wrong its hard to help you. You said you can restore your backup X conf from command line. From command line you can also see the X log to know what is wrong. to see run:

tail -f /var/log/Xorg.0.log

And see the lines at the end of the output marked (EE). They should point you in the right direction.

Its easy to hose your X with changing a conf file simply because it is a conf file and because of that, a single tiny mistake can make X unable to function with it. It has always been the same, hotplug or no hotplug.

To make it clear, the hotplug capacity ONLY kicks in if you plug in your tablet AFTER you have started X. It does nothing for tabletPC-s and you wont be bothered by it if your tablet is connected at all times. So you can have the fdi file that the this bug is about without any inconvenience.

Theres only one place where having both X conf and the hotplug fdi file is troublesome, and thats the wacom drivers workaround for hotplug. I you had the tablet at startup, unpluged and repluged it then now changing virtual terminals wont restore the full functionality for you because hotplug grabs the device, you need to restart x with your tablet already connected to avoid that.