What is hal daemon?

[konqueror101]

Hi Guys, I'm new to linux and i want to know what is Hal Daemon in Ubuntu 8.10? What is it used for and How could i use it? Please help me guys, just started with older versions of linux so that i could get acknowledged...

[MrChris-]

About Hal Daemon : HAL is a software project providing a hardware abstraction layer for Unix-like computer systems. It aims to allow desktop applications to discover and use the hardware of the host system through a simple, portable and abstract API, regardless of the type of the underlying hardware.[1]

HAL was originally envisioned by Havoc Pennington and is now a freedesktop.org project, being a key part of the software stack of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. It is free software, dual-licensed under both the GNU General Public License and the Academic Free License.

[konqueror101]

How do i use it with my hardware? Can i edit this hal daemon? I don't think i can but still if we can tweak this package to support more devices which are officially not supported? Well just a curious noob...

[Solomon]

On Linux, HAL uses the /sys filesystem to discover hardware and listen for kernel hotplug events. Some Linux distributions also provide a udev rule to allow the udev daemon to notify HAL whenever new device nodes appear. However this is a program that takes care of new hardware connected on yours computer, you cannot tweak it, but to support new devices, you will need new drivers and you add add the drivers in the database, hal daemon has nothing to do with it...