D-BUS, anyone?

[Rahul Siddharthan]

walt wrote:
>DragonFly is known for its messaging infrastructure, so this
>seems like a good place to ask about D-BUS:
>
>http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/dbus
>
>D-BUS is strictly userland, AFAIK.  I've suddenly started seeing
>dbus processes running in the background on linux and NetBSD, so
>developers in mainstream projects are beginning to use it.
>
>Anyone know about it, or have any thoughts to share?

I've been very impressed with linux lately: I installed ubuntu 5.10
on my wife's laptop, and if you insert a CD or a memory stick or
a digital camera or whatever, it "just works" -- an icon pops up on 
the desktop and you can look at the contents, drag and drop etc
(with either gnome or KDE).  This sort of thing is really needed for
non-techie users, but even I find it pretty convenient.

As I understand, it works with dbus and hal
   http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/hal
and hal, at least, requires kernel support: it seems to work only with
linux kernel 2.6, not 2.4.

In my opinion, the *only* thing holding linux back now is lack of
support for some esoteric hardware and lack of the most popular
windows software (eg, you can use gaim or kopete for instant
messaging, but you really don't get all the bells and whistles that
MSN or Yahoo messengers have).  In terms of intrinsic
userfriendliness, something like Ubuntu is already there now -- far
ahead of Windows actually.

It would be nice to see the BSDs in the same state sometime.

Rahul