HAL, new things

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 21:42 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Richard Hughes (hughsient at gmail.com) said: 
> > * Video Adaptor support, i.e. a SetLCDBrighness() method on applicable
> > laptops.
> 
> Considering the wonderful interfaces the kernel exports for this, the backend's
> going to be gross.

Sure, but we can make the backend hacky in HAL and present a nice
interface to the user, (that-is until we get a nice sysfs interface for
video adaptors, and then we can use that). Even if we get toshiba, asus
and ibm working, that's a large percentage.

> > * Device firmware request: i.e. if I insert my spiffy atmel 802.11b
> > pcmcia card, HAL tells me (dbus signal to notification-daemon?) I need
> > firmware before the device will work. Similar if I insert my friends
> > NTFS usb pendrive. Also it would be nice to know if I could look at a
> > website and get some info about a driver from CVS.
> 
> Where would you get the notification that the firmware load failed? Do you
> want this code in the udev firmware helper, to send a d-bus signal with
> the filename when firmware load fails? Or somewhere else?

Not sure, hence opening the discussion. :-) My initial thought was to
use notification-daemon, but that is a session DBUS service, whilst HAL
is per-system. Not sure if that would work - either way we need a way
for HAL to pop-up a box saying "You have a device that would work, if
you install the required firmware" (IANAL: never mentioning where to get
the firmware in question, cough, livna, cough :-)

Anyone got any good ideas?

Richard.