"Continuous querying to check for new or removed hardware
consumes CPU cycles and energy. On older, legacy hardware or any
system with limited processing power, including the lowest end of
today's netbooks, using HAL can actually impact system performance
in a noticeable way. On battery operated systems it also translates
into somewhat shorter battery life. For those interested in green
computing and reducing energy consumption the continuous polling
activity by the HAL daemon when no hardware changes take place is
simply wasteful. ,p>"VL-Hot, developed for Vector Linux,
provides an alternative that doesn't require continuous hardware
polling. Instead VL-Hot uses udev triggers to pop up the required
icons. The Vector Linux developers have VL-Hot working with
lightweight window managers like JWM and IceWM provided that the
PCMan File Manager is installed. I'm quite surprised that other
distributions which aim to be lightweight haven't incorporated
VL-Hot."
