HAL is going to be used combined with dbus to allow desktop applications to receive notifications from system-level applications about new hardware.
For instance you could set it up so that when you plug your camera into your USB port it will automaticly open up gtkam camera application so that you can easily pull photos off of your flash drive in your camera. That sort of thing.
hal home page
Dbus, btw, is a system communication bus so that user applications will be able to send signals to each other. Each user will have their own bus, and the system will have it's own independant communication bus and communication will be very restricted to the sorts of signals that can pass between users and the system.
One example that I've heard of is that a person setup a dbus aware mp3-type media player. Then they set up a program to monitor the modem for phone calls. That way they could listen to loud music, but when somebody called on the phone the application monitoring the modem sent a message to the mp3 player/volume manager and it would turn the volume of the music down automaticly.
The reason that I wanted to mention it is that I upgraded my Debian desktop today and decided to install HAL. When I did a apt-cache search for it it also turned up a program called hal-device-manager so that I installed that, too. I ran it and it seems very handly.
It's a windows style 'device manager' that we've all come to know and love 😛. Although it does give a lot more information about some devices and seems potentionally more usefull. Although there are a lot of "unkown devices"
The main thing right now is that for OSes that have HAL support it could make identifing devices very simple compared to what it used to be in linux. May be usefull for troubleshooting.
Gnome 2.8 should be one of the first desktops that incorporates some HAL/dbus features
edit:
Also when I plug my camera into my USB keyboard's USB port it automaticly shows up in the hal-device-manager after a 1-2 second delay. Automaticly without having to refresh anything or anything like that.
For instance you could set it up so that when you plug your camera into your USB port it will automaticly open up gtkam camera application so that you can easily pull photos off of your flash drive in your camera. That sort of thing.
hal home page
Dbus, btw, is a system communication bus so that user applications will be able to send signals to each other. Each user will have their own bus, and the system will have it's own independant communication bus and communication will be very restricted to the sorts of signals that can pass between users and the system.
One example that I've heard of is that a person setup a dbus aware mp3-type media player. Then they set up a program to monitor the modem for phone calls. That way they could listen to loud music, but when somebody called on the phone the application monitoring the modem sent a message to the mp3 player/volume manager and it would turn the volume of the music down automaticly.
The reason that I wanted to mention it is that I upgraded my Debian desktop today and decided to install HAL. When I did a apt-cache search for it it also turned up a program called hal-device-manager so that I installed that, too. I ran it and it seems very handly.
It's a windows style 'device manager' that we've all come to know and love 😛. Although it does give a lot more information about some devices and seems potentionally more usefull. Although there are a lot of "unkown devices"
The main thing right now is that for OSes that have HAL support it could make identifing devices very simple compared to what it used to be in linux. May be usefull for troubleshooting.
Gnome 2.8 should be one of the first desktops that incorporates some HAL/dbus features
edit:
Also when I plug my camera into my USB keyboard's USB port it automaticly shows up in the hal-device-manager after a 1-2 second delay. Automaticly without having to refresh anything or anything like that.
