Stop hald probing of certain devices (was: cdrecord floating point exception)

["Matthias Andree" <matthias.andree@gmx.de>]

Am 04.02.2009, 10:06 Uhr, schrieb Thomas Schmitt <scdbackup@gmx.net>:

> Hi,
>
> Rob Bogus wrote:
> > There is no doubt that a system can run without hald, if you assume  
> > that the
> > administrator is willing to do the same things by hand, and the user
> > understands how to do all the things which hald typically does.
>
> Personally i am a non-admin and leave
> my SuSEs quite as they come out of the
> box. Up to one year ago i had no hald
> running (SuSE 9 with kernel 2.4) and really
> did not miss it in any way.
>
> The only device automat i want is the
> USB plug-and-pull recognizer. That worked
> already on the old SuSEs without hald.
> I am not curious enough to explore whether
> hald is involved meanwhile.
> What i experienced at the first day of 10.2 was
> CD-RW burn failure due to hald-addon-storage
> processes. One per drive. They confessed by
> telling the drive addresses in ps output.
>
>
> Although i do not see it as necessary and do
> not like its behavior, i acknowledge that
> hald is there and that a burn program should
> seek coordination with it.
>
>
> > either using applications which understand hald
> > or making a simple one time change in the hald config.
>
> Any pointer to tutorial documentaion is
> higly welcome. Topics of interest:
>
> - Sysadmin:
>   How to keep hald away from the CD burner ?
>   (I would point from libburn docs to that.)

http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/halfaq.html#q2

Adapt that and you'll end up with something like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <!-- we want hald to skip cdrom drives -->
  <device>
    <match key="storage.drive_type" string="cdrom">
      <merge key="info.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

That you install as - for instance - 10-no-cdroms.fdi into
/usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/20thirdparty - however, that will likely break  
media detection on lots of typical distributions.

Let me say that I find intimidating how much XML configuration hal  
apparently needs on a typical distro...

> - Burn programmer (C language, console environment):
>   How to negociate with hald in order to either
>   get exclusivity at the drive or to learn that
>   it is already occupied ?
>
> What i would deem not acceptable for a burn program:
> - unstable API form and semantics
> - fat desktop libraries
> - non-C languages

That's for squeezing out of the hal maintainers ;-)

--
Matthias Andree