Safe to disable HAL?

[Jared Sutton]

I guess I needed to subscribe for this to go through...

[begin previous message]

Hi all,

I'm helping manage the Computer Science lab at a private University. 
We're dual-booting FC4/WinXP on all of the workstations, and upon 
upgrading to KDE 3.5 over the Christmas holiday, we found that KDE now 
auto-detects USB mass-storage devices that are plugged in, and mounts 
them.  We've had a system set up for this very thing, and we don't 
really have a need to change it (when it works well, why change?), so 
we'd like to disable this new action for all users.  I've discovered the 
easiest way to do this is to disable the haldaemon service in FC4.  I 
just wanted to make sure that disabling this service won't upset any 
other delicate processes in Fedora.  However, there isn't a whole lot of 
info about HAL scattered about the net.  Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jared Sutton