"One of the many new technologies for KDE 4 is the often mentioned, but seldom explained Solid Hardware API. Hardware has always been a bit of an annoying element of using Linux and other Unix [like] operating systems, but Solid hopes to fix that for KDE 4. In many ways, Solid is like Phonon, in that it's a Qt/KDE style API around already existing components at the lower level, such as freedesktop.org's HAL. It is already quite functional in the backend, and it's already affecting visible KDE components. Read on for more...
"Solid is an API for accessing device information such as available disks or networks. It does not deal with device drivers, leaving that to the OS. It does not deal with low level device information, leaving that to already existing, and very good tools such as HAL or other underlying subsystems..."
