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Oct 21 / kkrizka

HALd Hangs When Starting On Gentoo

For the last couple of days I have been having a problem with the Hardware Abstraction Layer daemon version 0.5.9.1 on my Gentoo Linux installation. Every time I tried to start it, it would just hang for a long time without showing any output, until after a few minutes it just failed to start. After searching on the internet for a while, I found several other people that have the same problem but have not found a solution, and it seems that Ubuntu is experiencing the same problem.

Since this was a new installation, I decided to check the Gentoo KDE HAL guide to make sure that I did not miss anything. It turned out that I did not miss anything, and I even had inotify support enabled in the kernel. That can checked that by typing the following command:

gunzip -c /proc/config.gz | grep INOTIFY

If you see the following output, then everything is alright. The y can be replaced by an m, meaning that you chose to compile it as a module.

CONFIG_INOTIFY=y
CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y

The next step was to see if hald is reporting any errors. This can be simply done by issuing the following command:

hald –daemon=no –verbose=yes

I found that the following error was being repeated over and over very fast, so if you see the same output read on to see my solution.

device_info.c:984: Unhandled rule (0)!

I am not sure which of the following commands solved it, but after I executed them all I no longer had any problems. I believe that the re-emerging of pciutils might have been the solution, because I remember that I originally left the zlib flag enabled, which is a big no-no if you want HALd to compile.

rm -rf /usr/share/hal/

emerge hal pciutils

2 Comments

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  1. Kamil Dudka / Dec 23 2007

    It realy helps. Thanks!

    • Elias P. / Mar 23 2008

      This might help, but doesn’t really solve the problem.
      By deleting /usr/share/hal you also delete the broken HAL FDI files put there by gphoto2 (see qfile /usr/share/hal).

      The solution would be, to fix the issue regarding gphoto2, which isn’t fixed yet in 2.4

      There’s also a Gentoo bug about this:
      http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172830

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