I know this isn't really the place for HAL questions but we got some smart people in the Slackware community. So ima ask here anyway.

I check "ps aux" and see that HAL is running. But when I build some apps they complain that KDE D-Bus can't be found. What's up with that? Why do some apps complain about KDE D-Bus when I do a configure --without-kde? I have run into several apps that complain about this. Why wouldn't HAl D-Bus running on my system satisfy the Hal/D-bus dep?

Then when I start KDE and try and build the app it builds fine?? SOme of these apps aren't even specifically made for KDE. And then some apps complain about D-Bus, not particularly KDE, and won't build. The more that app builders are depending on HAL/D-Bus the more confusing it gets.

Does anyone have any insight into this?

Thanks

Could you please more specific?

What are your distribution and version?
Which app(s) are you trying to build and how ?
What are the exact error message(s) you get ?

Other than that, HAL and D-Bus are two different apps.