General questions about HAL

[Niki Kovacs]

Hi,

I'm an Austrian writer living in Montpezat (South France) and a 100% GNU/Linux
user since 2001. I've been using Slackware Linux exclusively for the last two
years.

I use Linux as my only desktop OS on all my five PC's here, and I'm really happy
with it. But one thing always bothered me, and I never knew how to change it:
removable devices. One typical scenario:

1) Buy new USB stick.

2) Plug it in.

3) Check either log messages, or take a peek in /dev, to know its name.

4) Check the output of the corresponing udevinfo

5) Write udev rule with a symlink to /dev/usbstick, for example

6) Write a persistent entry in /etc/fstab

7) Create according desktop icon when using KDE or the likes.

I've been wondering for quite a long time if it isn't possible to do it just
like with Mac OS X. Plug in the device, desktop icon appears, double-click on
it, and here we go. No way. It was either like described above, or be careful
never to mount, say, my USB stick at the same time than my camera, so it
doesn't suddenly become sdb1.

So, first things first, a general question about HAL. Is it possible to achieve
transparent handling of removable devices with HAL? E. g. plug in a usb stick,
thing gets mounted under /mnt/usbstick, for example. Plug in a usb mass storage
camera, thing gets mounted under /mnt/camera and doesn't interfere with the usb
stick.

I reckon building HAL on Slackware is quite a hassle, but I'm ready to undergo
quite some of that just to achieve something like I described. Documentation on
the web is unfortunately rather sparse, so I decided to subscribe to this
list... hope I'm not in the wrong place.

Other general question: if HAL applies as a candidate for what I want it to do,
how stable (e. g. production-ready) is it?

Regards,

Niki Kovacs