[Lucid Xubuntu] power manager fails to dbus-activate hal

I get this as well in Xubuntu Alternate i386

Using Xubuntu 10.04 - i386

Hardware:

Gateway MX6433 Laptop
AMD Turion 64 ML-30
512 MiB RAM

For more detail on hardware, see attached file.

Martin: is there something to change on our side, or is the bug in hal?

Why is HAL not running for these folks? What happens when they try to re/start it manually?:
sudo service hal restart

HAL is no longer a service that can be started via upstart. (https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/0.5.14-0ubuntu2)

hal is run through D-Bus activation now, instead of an init/upstart script. This is because booting/X/GNOME does not need hal any more these days.

If an app wants to connect to hal, it should get auto-spawned. This works fine for gnome-power-manager and pitivi at least. So perhaps x-p-m does something more cautious, like testing if hal is running before connecting to it (this doesn't work -- it just needs to go ahead connecting).

Does someone have a debug output of x-p-m? How is that done?

Relevant: http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6116

Martin: FWICT, xfce4-power-manager calls dbus_bus_name_has_owner to check that hal is already running. So this is as you wrote. Thanks for the hint. I can probably patch all xfce programs using hal to stop doing that...

But then I wonder if someone checked how many softwares are broken with your changes (main is probably fine because GNOME switched to *kit, but universe isn't). Some mass bug filling could be really useful...

Lionel Le Folgoc [2010-01-16 18:16 -0000]:
> I can probably patch all xfce programs using hal to stop doing
> that...

If it really does affect that many programs, then I wonder whether
this could be eased by forcing hal startup at the startup of XFCE by
using dbus-send to activate hal. Do you think that would be easier?

libhal1
Reverse Depends:
  libexo-0.3-0
  exo-utils
  libthunar-vfs-1-2
  xfburn
  xfce4-volstatus-icon
  xfce4-governor-plugin
  xfce4-cddrive-plugin
  thunar-volman
hal
Reverse Depends:
  xfce4-power-manager
  thunar
  xfburn
  xubuntu-desktop
  xfce4-session

I haven't checked if they are affected or not, it's just a raw output.
Forcing hal to start with dbus-send can probably do it, but it's really ugly because xfce is modular, so components can be used separately without xfce4-session... Moreover, xfce4-power-manager will still fail to do anything useful when started by gdm.

I posted this duplicate of this problem Bug #508386 , so thanks to Dave Lentz for his xorg tip as that allowed me to login by getting my keyboard to work. I had to modify his xorg.conf for my devices and I have attached this just in case someone needs a tip. When you click away the message and then log in it does come back once more. Click though that and things are almost back to normal.

>When you ssh into the install, try starting HAL manually:
>sudo service hal restart

The service seems to be already running so this does not help.

service hal start

hal start/running, process 10995

>I forget if the packages are installed by default, but you'll need them for the above suggestion:
>sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-kbd

Yes they are.

Can I assume usb disks are not being mounted automatically for example could be due to this? This has worked on every prior version prior to this with the same kit.

Xfce4-power-manager seems to be the only one affected, I'll make a quick and dirty patch to workaround this issue.

Mmh, in fact I don't know if it's the only one affected. Please file a new bug report if you experience new problems (with tunar and automount for instance).

This bug was fixed in the package xfce4-power-manager - 0.8.4.2-1ubuntu3

---------------
xfce4-power-manager (0.8.4.2-1ubuntu3) lucid; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/xubuntu-assume-hal-is-available.patch: do not check for hal
    presence on the bus, it'll be spawned automatically on demand. lp: #507097
  * debian/patches/series: refreshed.
 -- Lionel Le Folgoc <email address hidden> Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:41:48 +0100

Oops, sorry about that!