Ubuntu
hal package

Cannot get past "Starting Hardware Abstraction Layer Hald"

Asked by Toby

After a clean expert install of Gutsy I keep getting bootup problems when it attempts to initialise HAL. It will take 5 minutes to initialise hald then fail to start X.

On each occasion I have installed Gutsy I have done several things: allowed my user sudo without password in Visudo, enabled restricted drivers, installed build-essentials, XGL, compiz settings etc. etc. , run updates, compiled and installed Ndiswrapper, set a custom grub option... somewhere along the lines an error has occured and the system begins to slow down and I lose the ability to sudo 'access to Sudoers - permission denied', then on restarting I encounter the HAL problem described above.

I have changed visudo settings back to normal, just incase it has been causing the problem. I have changed the boot order placing Hal after other proccesses. And all to no avail. I have had this hardware configuration running with Gutsy 32 and 64 before and had no problems of this nature. But on the last 4 installs, I have encountered this hal issue.

I suspect that perhaps It is a permissions thing in relation to Sudo. If someone knows a fix or can explain. thnaks

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Pramod Dematagoda (pmdematagoda) said : 		#1

When you boot Ubuntu in Recovery Mode, can you start HAL using:-

/etc/init.d/hal start

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Toby (06000761-brookes) said : 		#2

Thanks for the reply.

In direct response to your question, I no longer have the system state available where I can try to initialise manually. But I have recreated the problem again since and am doing another clean install as I type. I believe I have narrowed the problem down to a single proprietary program... Nero. On running Nero after installation the process 'Trackerd' will take full usage of CPU and all access to Sudoers is blocked. What little I do know of Nero is that it requires Root to start, can this in some way pickled my Sudo privs? I also used Initng which initialised in a completely different order and gnome could not be started either due to privillages. At what stage of initialisation are root permissions effective?

As it stands I just need a functional Ubuntu install and am not planning on recreating this problem again so am prepared to let this one lie. Although if anyone can answer this query it would further my understanding of Nix and Nero.

Thanks again for the response

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Pramod Dematagoda (pmdematagoda) said : 		#3

I am sorry, but why on earth does Nero need root permissions? I have never used Nero myself but I have used burning software that are better than Nero(in my opinion) such as K3B and Brasero and they never requested root permissions. This does not answer your question, but you aught to try a different burning software such as K3B or Brasero.

K3B can be installed using:-

sudo apt-get install k3b

Brasero can be installed using:-

sudo apt-get install brasero

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