Harware Abstraction Layer

magen · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2009 Posts: 7 Location: Europe

hi all,

after reading alot about hal on the internet, i still doubt if i should enable it's flag or not. my system is very basic, i got a laptop with no particularly exotic hardware, my configuration files are all optimized for it and i kept the hal flag disabled all the time. thing is, i just finished installing the base system, xorg and a few utilities, and i have notice that, with the use flag enabled, many apps require a large amount of extra dependencies. what do you think? is hal a must, or can i just leve it disabled? and.. since hal is a layer betwenn comunication of software and hardware, does it actually influence the system's response in any way? systems like ubuntu have it enabled by default, obviously, because they ar meant to run on a large variety of hardware, but my machine seems to run fine without it.. well, thanks in advance for any tip...
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RedSquirrel · Guru Joined: 22 Apr 2008 Posts: 336

I believe it mostly depends on the software you have installed and how you want it to behave.

For me, hal is not "a must"; I don't use it at all. My system is very minimal. I use a light window manager and just a handful of applications.

The new xorg-server can use hal to do some fancy autodetection. I compiled my xorg-server without hal since I still use my custom xorg.conf. Some people like devices to automount using hal. I dislike automounting.

There may be some applications that expect or prefer hal to be enabled, but I do not use any of those applications. Large desktop environments may be happiest when hal is enabled.

You can list the packages you have installed that have the hal USE flag:

magen · n00b Joined: 13 Mar 2009 Posts: 7 Location: Europe

well ok now i know i'm not gonna use it. i only use fluxbox or wmii and don't use applications that seem to reqiuire hal, my xorg.conf is customized and i also have no interest in any form of auto-detection (for me, it only messes up things). thanks for the answer.
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VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Does "no particularly exotic hardware" implies for you "no cd/dvd drive" ?

lonrot_m · Apprentice Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 274 Location: Mexico

i dont have the flag either, and also have a minimal system since i don't like having too many dependencies installed. Using mount isn't so bad
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