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Ruby D-Bus and Fedora 11

Earlier this year I wrote a number of posts about monitoring and interacting with D-Bus using shell scripts. In this post I look at using Ruby to monitor and interact with D-Bus enabled applications.

Scripting D-Bus

D-Bus (Desktop Bus) is a low-latency, low-overhead, easy-to-use message bus technology which supports application launch and linking.  It is primarly used on GNU/Linux desktops but has been ported to other platforms including Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X.&nbsp This post provides a quick overview of D-Bus concepts, some history, and some examples of how to use D-Bus in your shell scripts. Originally both the KDE and GNOME desktop projects used CORBA for inter-application communication.  Over time however, for various reasons, KDE migrated from CORBA to Desktop Comunications Protocol (DCOP) and GNOME migrated to Bonono.  This lead to the situation

Scripting HAL

Recent releases of Fedora and other GNU/Linux distributions include a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) which is used to support device plug-and-play capabilities.  In this post I will show you how your shell scripts can use HAL to retrieve device and system information. The term HAL is overloaded as it used to refer both to a specification and the actual software which implements the specification.  From an application developers viewpoint, HAL is way to enumerate the capabilities and features of hardware attached to a system and receive notification when something about the hardware changes. First, a very quick overview of HAL.