Relationship between /dev and /udev

[Andrew]

Hi,

Andy Green wrote:

>I wish RH would maintain a little "new technologies" page on their site, this 
>HAL, udev, mdnsresponder etc have been showing up in FC3 and I don't have any 
>idea what they are.  The Jargon Buster on the Fedora page doesn't know what 
>they are either.  If it already exists somewhere please reply pointing to 
>it :-)
>
>  
>
Actually David Zeuthen has a lot of good stuff over at freedesktop.org 
especially on hal as he is the primary author. 
http://freedesktop.org/Software/hal
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.hal  [ for the hal list ] 
This is where the hal developers do there thing, a lot of the dev 
process patches and so on, but  reading helped me a lot.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/utopia-list   [ for the utopia list ]

for udev look at
http://webpages.charter.net/decibelshelp/LinuxHelp_UDEVPrimer.html

Hal is great! it is  one of the most important things I have seen to 
date (at least since RH 6) in making Linux a really usable desktop.  
With utopia (hal dbus and gnome-volume-manager) I can (as a non-admin) 
plug in my usb flash drive and it will detect, create a mount point if 
needed and mount it and pop window with the contents automatically -- 
just like other desktop OSes that are very much less than free!  Plus, 
you can create policy rules to keep that from happening if you want to, 
but at least now it can work without having to either su or sudo!

>Anyway, my little store of knowledge on the subject of /dev (not udev) says 
>that you can make device "files" anywhere, not just in /dev, and that you can 
>have multiple device files for the same device no problem.  The major and 
>minor numbers you give mknod make the file "special" and associated with a 
>particular kernel device driver on the kernel side, not that it is in /dev.  
>Whether this is useful to unpicking the mysteries I am not sure.
>
>  
>
Of course that's true, its just getting the the right stuff in the place 
the rest of the sound code is looking for them. (or making it look in 
the right places)

Andrew

>- -Andy
>
>- -- 
>http://www.addintelligence.co.uk -- we design custom hardware and software for 
>your products 
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