device issues with 'hald'

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday, 2009-11-19, spir wrote:
> Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at> wrote:
> > On Thursday, 2009-11-19, spir wrote:
> > > * There is an issue about hal and solid, or rather they do not seem
> > >   to understand each other. Seems to be rather on hald's side, for
> > >   even if hald runs I cannot execute 'lshal'; output:
> > >
> > >     spir at o:~$ lshal
> > >     Could not initialise connection to hald.
> > >     Normally this means the HAL daemon (hald) is not running or not
> > > ready.
> > >
> > > * I also tried (found on another thread):
> > >     spir at o:/media/cdrom0$ hal-disable-polling --enable --device
> > > /dev/cdrom Could not initialise connection to hald.
> > >     Normally this means the HAL daemon (hald) is not running or not
> > > ready.
> >
> > Both errors say that hald is probably not running.
> 
> Yes, I know, but as shown in another parts of my post, I get proper
>  feedback when running hald with --verbose:
> 
> spir at o:~$ hald --verbose=yes
> 12:29:37.191 [I] hald.c:680: hal 0.5.13
> 12:29:37.192 [I] hald.c:681: using child timeout 250s
> 12:29:37.192 [I] hald.c:690: Will daemonize
> 12:29:37.192 [I] hald.c:691: Becoming a daemon

But this is you explicitly starting hald as a user. hald is a system service.
All its clients will look for it on the D-Bus system bus.

Try this:
dbus-send --print-reply --system --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus 
/org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames | grep Hal

that should give an output like

      string "org.freedesktop.Hal"

> > Can you check your process list, e.g. through CTRL+ESC, if hald or
> > /usr/sbin/hald or similar show up?
> >
> > Most like as a system user, here is uses "haldaemon"
> 
> Yes, I get it listed as you say, with "hald" as process name and
>  "haldaemon" as fake user name. By the way, why this? Does it mean eg
>  "haldaemon" has, or should have, specific "privileges"? Anyway, we know
>  hald runs, but it does not respond to lshal requests.

It runs as a special user so the system can limit what it is allowed to do and 
what it needs to delegate to more priviledged helper programs (which then in 
turn have to be more thoroughly checked for potential security issues).

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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