[NTLUG:Discuss] The Linux capability that reveals your system

[Chris Cox]

On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 14:34 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 23:17 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> > Ted Gould wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 18:46 -0600, Allen Meyers wrote:
> > >> I do not need a windows control panel but would be nice to get a glimpse of
> > >> system and possibly a clone for device manager, Please do not tell me I need
> > >> to reinstall windows
> > > 
> > > HAL contains all of the information that you're looking for.  That's the
> > > hardware abstraction layer.  A tool that I like to view HAL is
> > > gnome-device-manager.  If you're more of a commandline type of guy you
> > > can just do lshal and you'll get more data than you wanted :)  lshal
> > > does have filters if you read the man page.
> > 
> > hal is an abstraction.  A layer.  But, when available, it's fairly
> > complete... but not necessarily complete.
> > 
> > Just fyi.
> 
> Oh!  I didn't know that, I've never noticed anything missing in HAL,
> what am I missing?

Depends.  Basically anything for which drivers don't  communicate
something onto the dbus about the device.

With that said, there are some pollers in the hal daemon I believe
to try to find certain things (polling being... in general, a bad
thing).  My point is that it's NOT the source of the info, but
a populated area.