VL-Hot + HAL in VL 5.9 == one big mess

[uelsk8s]

The Hal, and Dbus in the Pseudo releases came straight from slack.
We will look into what is causing them to not function correctly.
Our plan at this point is to include them with an easy option to turn them on/off
On new systems hal shouldnt be a problem but it slows some older ones down

[M0E-lnx]

On new systems hal shouldnt be a problem but it slows some older ones down

I can confirm that... The difference is mostly RAM usage. My laptop now reports > 35% RAM usage even when just idling.
Did not happen before hal was running (I noticed this ever since I installed Gnome in 5.8 SOHO, and even now in Pseudo 1.7, it's the same)

I haven't noticed any performance lag at all, no difference on CPU usage, just ram.

[stoichyu]

Ok, I found a fix for the xfce mount/unmount problem, make a file /etc/dbus-1/system.d/xfce.conf

<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC
 "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>

  <policy context="default">
    <allow receive_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device"
           receive_sender="org.xfce.FileManager"/>
  </policy>

</busconfig>

I'm not exactly sure why xfce didn't do that already for us, but that gives Thunar permission to contact hal to mount/unmount devices. However, caitlyn was right in saying that vl-hot + hal is a mess. Since vl-hot mounts the device, hal assumes that you mounted it yourself so you can't unmount it through hal.

[Freston]

I don't want to interfere in your policies (or maybe I do  ), but the lack of HAL is one of the things like about this distro. I think I killed vl-hot too, for that matter.

I hate auto-mount. I don't understand vl-hot yet. And I'm working on a bashscript to suit my mounting needs. One that fires up my bluetooth mouse as well

Do as you think is best, as long as it's easy to turn off.

[stoichyu]

I just found out that you can disable hal. As root, run "/etc/rc.d/rc.hald stop" or if you're lazy "killall hald" and if you want to make it permanent "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hald". xfce doesn't really require hal, even if it was built with hal enabled. vl-hot also shouldn't be hard to disable, for those who prefer hal.

[caitlyn]

Stoichyu:  Thanks for the script to fix HAL to allow communications.  Yep, that works.

I have no doubt that either HAL or VL-Hot can be disabled easily.  The point I'm making, which seems to be getting lost, is that one or the other should be disabled by default when VL is booted up.  Having both running is truly awful.  Pick one for the default config.

Having both on the iso or installed is fine.  Create a script run from VASM to toggle between HAL and VL-Hot and you'd have the best of both worlds.

Re: performance.  VL SOHO 5.8.6rc2 with HAL is really fast on my five year old Toshiba laptop (1GB Celeron, 512MB RAM) but RAM usage is definitely up.  I notice this when I'm running KDE, which is a resource hog to begin with, and then add one or more resource (especially RAM) intensive apps like Firefox and OpenOffice.  Then the system begins to drag a bit.  It's still usable, but it's noticeable. 

I really think the ideal would be a user choice with HAL as the default.

[Joe1962]

Disabling vl-hot is indeed easy. It is not a daemon, all that is required is disabling the respective udev rules (/etc/udev/rules.d/10-vl-hot.rules). Just rename it to 10-vl-hot.rules.disabled, for example. Renaming it back activates it.

[newt]

If I understand the HAL vs VL-Hot issue correctly it's _mainly_ an issue of having a hardware-polling service running at all times or not using up memory and cpu resources; functionality of the hardware devices is also at hand.  If this is "the bulk of it" then I would prefer to stick to the exisiting VL-Hot enabled, HAL disabled scenario.  I find that VL58Standard does a great job of automounting my flash and CD drives without effort.  The umounting can occasionally be troublesome on the flash drive but certainly not always.  It usually just takes waiting a few minutes for the system to release the flash drive.  The less constant-polling features VL has running the faster VL will feel to people, and S-P-E-E-D is VL's thing.  In nearly every review of VL, the speed of the OS is mentioned and highly praised (old and new hardware alike).  In fact I often times read about how great the speed of VL is on peoples old hardware and those people are amazed that the devs can make this distro as responsive as it is (i.e. FAST!!!).  I have no doubt that our "speed" notariety is attributed to the collective system resource savings brought on by all those little things like VL-Hot instead of HAL.

My choice: VL-Hot by default with a simple VASM toggle to switch between VL-Hot and HAL (as cait mentioned).

[Joe1962]

The umounting can occasionally be troublesome on the flash drive but certainly not always.  It usually just takes waiting a few minutes for the system to release the flash drive.

That's when the filesystem is writing out cached data to the flash drive. You can select non-cached writes in vl-hot-config to get instant unmounting, but then writing to the flash drive becomes as slow as in Windows (if not slower).

EDIT: In non-cached mode, the life of the flash drive can also be reduced due to excessive wear of the FAT area. I'd noticed that my old 256MB pendrive has lasted for many years, while those of my coleagues (even the exact same model) tend to die at an early age. I recently found an article with a technical explanation for this.

[newt]

Thanks for the explanation of why the umounting of my flash drive is occasionally slow.  Now that I know the reason it makes me feel better - i.e. it's by design.  From the way you describe it, I think I'll stick with the default cache method to avoid slow writes and reduced flash drive life.  Thanks for all you (and ALL devs) do for VL!!
Cheers! :beer:

[Dweeberkitty]

My choice: VL-Hot by default with a simple VASM toggle to switch between VL-Hot and HAL (as cait mentioned).

I really like that idea! The ability to chose between one or the other sounds great! Everybody's happy! 

[Dweeberkitty]

With HAL in SOHO, we can use the OpenSuse KIO Slave sysinfo:/ which is actually kind of nice:



Here's the link for it: http://www.kde-apps.org/index.php?xsortmode=high&page=0&xcontentmode=37

It seems to be much more useful, dynamic, and user friendly than media:/ I don't know, it's just a thought.

[easuter]

Dweeberkitty, VL 5.9 already has a hardware profiler called "hardinfo". You can find it in the System menu.
It provides a lot more info than the above mentioned tool, and even provides CPU benchamarking using gzip, blowfish and other algorithms.

Its not as polished, but its very fast and well organized.

[exeterdad]

That is VERY nice! (hardinfo)

[wcs]

If possible, the idea of switching between hal and vl-hot sounds great. It's all about choice...

If not, my vote goes for vl-hot. It seems more in line with vl's speed on low RAM computers. And using the xfce mount applet or a desktop launcher to (un)mount cd's and usb stuff seems very functional to me.

What exactly does one miss by not having HAL? So far, the only absence I noted in the xfce4-no-hal package (in 5.8 standard) is that the mounted cd's and usb pendrives do not show up in Thunar.