
Red Hat, which started the
HAL project many years ago, has deprecated it in favor of a new initiative called
DeviceKit. David Zeuthen, primary developer of DeviceKit, has
posted on his blog about the work done by the Red Hat Desktop team in
Fedora 11 for improving the storage layer in GNOME by taking advantage of DeviceKit. This includes desktop notification if your hard disk is failing, a desktop utility to handle RAID and LVM storage, a replacement for the venerable gfloppy, and many others. Look at his blog for a number of screenshots showing the details.
"The GNOME 2.26 release in Fedora 11 will ship with a completely different stack for handling storage devices. The plan is to land all this work in the upstream GNOME 2.28 release and most of that work is done already."