Re: [gnome-devel] Re: Autodetect CD

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

Reginald Johnson wrote:
> If there isn't a method to do this, how are media players such as XMMS 
> able to accomplish somthing similar?  They don't seem to be running in 
> the background so they can't be resorting to polling the CD.  Any ideas 
> how they are able to do this?

They poll.  Polling doesn't require them to actively run.  They just 
wake up once every second or so, check if there's a CD, and then go back 
to sleep.  Tools like ps or top probably won't ever be able to catch the 
app in that window without real SMP and some very good timing.

In the future they will hopefully use HAL events and such, as will all 
other desktop apps.