Still on the exam countdown, Friday’s the day. I can’t wait to be finished and I’ll be home to good food and beer on Saturday.
I got in two hours early this morning (bus schedule is infrequent during summer) and decided to take a study break. So I browsed to breakmygentoo.org and snagged their gnome-volume-manager ebuilds, cooked them up and started the service. The result is
balor@navi ~ $ gnome-volume-manager
manager.c/577: New Device: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_8ec_11_200_-1_070FB20F26001670
manager.c/577: New Device: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usbif_usb_8ec_11_200_-1_070FB20F26001670_0
manager.c/577: New Device: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/scsi_host_0
manager.c/577: New Device: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/scsi_device_0_0_0_0
manager.c/638: Device removed: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/scsi_device_0_0_0_0
manager.c/638: Device removed: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/scsi_host_0
manager.c/638: Device removed: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usbif_usb_8ec_11_200_-1_070FB20F26001670_0
manager.c/638: Device removed: /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_8ec_11_200_-1_070FB20F26001670
now that mightn’t look like much, but it works. When I plug in my USB pendrive it recognises it, when I plug it out, the event is also recognised. It seems that the planned integration of gnome-volume-manager into Gnome 2.8 will actually work. For the first time on a GNU/Linux desktop we’ll have the “real” device hotplugging that Apple OS X and Windows 2k+ have enjoyed. One more step twords world domination 
I’ll not play with this any further, but when I get home I’m gonna try and get all the nice GUI stuff around it working and post some screenshots.
Update:
Getting the GUI goodness was easy
