On apples
Julien Blache has been writing something called "pomme", to do some stuff with backlights for apple laptops--which explaines the name of the thing, since Julien is French.
One thing I've been wondering about, however, is why he chose to write something entirely new rather than submitting patches for pbbuttons, which does exactly the same.
His blog doesn't allow for comments currently (boo!), so I made this a blog post of my own. So, Julien, please convince me: what does pomme do that pbbuttons doesn't?
HAL already handles quite a few Apple specific events through their addons:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=tree;h=adee8a6d354742bd33efc374de266cdc7d32336b;hb=f1a782ba96ce5a555c606170c23792ab31e6980c;f=hald/linux/addons
If there's anything left to be desired in HAL then the right thing to do is fix HAL and not write your own new toy software.
Apparently pommed supports D-Bus. HAL does as well. Having two daemons on the system bus which handle and forward Apple system events sounds rather stupid to me!