“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…”