HAL vs. VLHOT

[Gullible Jones]

Using VLHOT instead of HAL looks like a good way to reduce overhead on my system (and especially on older systems with slow CPUs). But what are the disadvantages of using VLHOT? Will it cooperate with the automount/unmount features of file managers such as PCManFM and Thunar? Does it work with card readers on laptops? Why hasn't it been adopted by the rest of the Linux community?

(Alright, that last question is half in jest. The other half is me wondering how HAL and its endless XML scripts managed to be adopted by everyone, because there has to be a better way of doing things! )

[caitlyn]

Your assessment of VL-Hot is an excellent one.  It will save overhead and improve performance on older or otherwise limited systems.  It works based on udev triggers.  That's fine for PCMCIA cards, Express cards, firewire and USB devices, and memory cards.  It most certainly does work with card readers on laptops.  It works fine with both Thunar and PCManFM.

What VL-Hot does not handle are CDs, DVDs, and floppies.  Inserting a CD-ROM, for example, doesn't trigger an event in udev so VL-Hot doesn't know about it.  You end up having to manually mount that sort of removable media, either with something like the mount applet in Xfce or else at the command line.

Oh, and yes, VL-Hot would be a great addition to other distributions that aspire to be lightweight.

HTH,
Cait

[Lyn]

I tend to use IceWM and usually install rox, then add an icon to the toolbar pointing to /mnt

ie

prog "Mount Removable Devices" /usr/X11R6/share/icons/Vista-Inspirate_1.0/32x32/devices/cdrom_mount.png rox /mnt

this does it quite well for me for cd roms etc

[wcs]

It most certainly does work with card readers on laptops.

On my desktop system, putting an sd card in the slot is not detected by vl-hot, unless I do "sginfo -l" which does a "media refresh". There is an icon for this in the xfce launchers (at least in the 5.9 deluxe edition).
However, I also find that this cannot be run as a normal user, so ended up having to add "sginfo" to /etc/sudoers, and change the launcher line to "sudo sginfo -l".

VL-HOT is a great application. If you happen to mind having to mount cd's with the mount applet, and (perhaps) cards with the "media refresh" launcher, maybe HAL is best.