General questions about HAL

[Artem Kachitchkine]

> May I infer from your response that there is no doc (comprehensive or
> techno-laconic) available?

Not that I know of. So you'll have to experiment with it. What I would do:

- familiarize yourself with D-BUS http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
- build dbus, make 'dbus-daemon --system' running and 'dbus-monitor --system' 
working;
- build hal, in the hald directory run ./run-hald.sh, watch the messages;
- run lshal;
- run 'lshal -m', plug in a USB device and see if HAL notices it;
- now that you have HAL events flying, choose an event handling app that you 
like: gnome-volume-manager? ivman? KDE?

Volume mounting methods vary across distros: some use pmount, others use latest 
Mount() method (see tools/hal-system-storage-mount)

Security options may also vary: some use pamconsole/at_console, some don't.

For problem resolution, try googling mail archives (but not too far in the 
past). It helps to install a distro that ships with HAL and compare your 
configuration with theirs; bringing up latest HAL on a HAL-less distro is harder 
than on a HAL-ful. If you hit the wall, ask here.

-Artem.