Hi,

I have installed both Arch and FreeBSD. They both required me to run the dbus and hal daemons, in order for mouse and keyboard interaction.

I have done a little bit of research and I believe hal is need so applications can use hardware and dbus so applications can use software.

So my question is am I right? If I am not, can someone please explain what they do?

Thanks

Edit: The title is supposed to be dbus not dbud, I'm sorry for the typo

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HalFAQ

From what I understand, HAL functionality is wrapped up with udev and dbus with the goal of making hardware access and utilization easier for desktop software. HALd is a system daemon which utilizes dbus to communicate hardware status, changes, and such like to desktop software.

DBus, viewed by itself, is basically a system for inter-process communication. Basically, programs register with the DBUS daemon so they can receive certain kinds of messages from other programs, without the other programs needing to know that they are listening (signals). Or it can be used by programs on the same system to talk to each other without having to create a special program just for that purpose. The popular uses for DBus are (1) to facilitate communication between HAL layers and desktop software (as above), and (2) to facilitate communication between various desktop software which are part of the same session. (E.g., your various Gnome applications). Broadly speaking, though, you could use DBus for any kind of session based, single system IPC project: for example, years ago I used DBus for communication between various components of a robotics project.

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