udev-discover is a very useful tool for all developers who use to deal with hardware. It use GUdev to get the info and has a very nice features to make the hardware integration debugging easier.

It was inspired on the old GNOME Device Manager (which was based on the HAL Device Manager), which wasn’t no longer active after the migration from HAL to GUdev, but then he added some very nice features such a search box, debug output console, the possibility of select the subsystems you want to be shown, follow the signals and new devices pluged in realtime and much more.

I have to say that I use it a lot lately and I’m very happy with it

UPDATES:

• I forgot to link the code which is (by now) hosted at Github until Félix move the project to GNOME infrastructures.
• I also forgot to mention that I got it working fine at Ubuntu Oneiric, but it has a little bug about one path which is already reported. Félix told me that a minor version with this and other minor bugs fixed will be released very soon along with packages for Oneiric at the ppa.

Yesterday Carlos told me about Ubuntu’s plans for Karmic and the Hal deprecation. I don’t really know how could I miss this, but I didn’t know before…

Lately I was working a bit with Hal and I kinda like it. As far as I saw, there is a GNOME plan for that deprecation and hal will be split into different pieces which will be integrated into other software. Such a udev-extras, libudev, DeviceKit-*, the kernel itself and so.

I’ve been reading quite a lot about all those changes and I don’t really get the reasons for this move. And I don’t really know how the things will work when the migration be completed.

No more hal at all? No hal-info either? just udev rules (which, btw,  I find really confusing and ugly…)?

I hope someone could help me to see how the things will be at the near future around the hardware layer on GNU/Linux.

Thanks