Tweaking CONCURRENCY and HAL breakage

[tza]

I see many posts on the forum and launchpad regarding HAL breakage (error dialog on boot: HAL failed to initialize), I had this problem also and after a week of slogging through posts I found my solution.

Being an idiot, I used a feisty tweaking how-to, even though I had installed gutsy from tribe 5 and that how-to doesn't make any reference to gutsy.

I changed my /etc/init.d/rc to CONCURRENCY=shell

HAL broke

Upgrades, updates, reinstalling and a week of wading thru forum posts and launchpad bugs I finally found a small message (that I didn't copy the link to), stating that another user had altered the init.d/rc and that returning 'CONCURRENCY=none' sloved the difficulty. This worked for me also.

So, I haven't officially debugged the issue, but after a week of nothing else fixing the problem, undoing the change that I had made myself did in fact fix HAL. Now I have no problems at all. Even suspend works (of course I have a desktop machine).

If you have changed your concurrency setting to coax a little more speed out of boot-up, I might suggest returning to the default and see if that doesn't help.

Of course, I might have the only one dumb enough to try this. I hope so. If not, then I hope this helps and solves your problem.

[howlsmoving]

Thanks for doing the research. This solved one of my problems with hal.

[Sunforge]

Yup Tza I tried the same thing last night and broke the HAL quite nicely, with concurrency=shell. Setting back to none and all my problems evaporated.

Have you found any reference to why it breaks Gutsy?

[kubug]

Nope... you are by no means by yourself with having tried this tweak. I also had to undo this to make HAL work again. And like yourself I had to search through quite some amount of google results to find the answer.

[caffienefree]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/149881

Hum. I'd be really interested to see if passing it startpar instead of shell evokes the same error behavior. If no one else gives it a try before then, I'll test it tonight.

[caffienefree]

Okay... so don't try startpar. It doesn't work anymore. XD

This is an interesting issue, we'll have to look indepth into it. I'll try this weekend.

[jocko]

I noticed the same problem a few weeks ago. I found a solution somewhere on this forum.
If I remember correctly, the problem was that dbus needs to start before hal, which apparently doesn't happen with "concurrency=shell".
In the /etc/rc*.d/ directories (*=2,3,4&5), the links to hal and dbus had the same numbers, i.e they were set to start at the same time.
The links were named S12dbus and S12hal, and the fix was to rename S12hal to S13hal.

If you feel like trying it, these commands should do it:
sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S12hal /etc/rc2.d/S13hal
sudo mv /etc/rc3.d/S12hal /etc/rc3.d/S13hal
sudo mv /etc/rc4.d/S12hal /etc/rc4.d/S13hal
sudo mv /etc/rc5.d/S12hal /etc/rc5.d/S13hal
The set concurrency to shell and see if it works after a reboot.

[Sunforge]

I'll just have to give that a go tomorrow night when I've got an evening spare.

I'm sure I can come up with all sorts of other chaos to wreak on gutsy at the same time.

[ArcticD00d]

I noticed the same problem a few weeks ago. I found a solution somewhere on this forum.
If I remember correctly, the problem was that dbus needs to start before hal, which apparently doesn't happen with "concurrency=shell".
In the /etc/rc*.d/ directories (*=2,3,4&5), the links to hal and dbus had the same numbers, i.e they were set to start at the same time.
The links were named S12dbus and S12hal, and the fix was to rename S12hal to S13hal.

If you feel like trying it, these commands should do it:
sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S12hal /etc/rc2.d/S13hal
sudo mv /etc/rc3.d/S12hal /etc/rc3.d/S13hal
sudo mv /etc/rc4.d/S12hal /etc/rc4.d/S13hal
sudo mv /etc/rc5.d/S12hal /etc/rc5.d/S13hal
The set concurrency to shell and see if it works after a reboot.

This does indeed fix the problem. Hopefully this will make its way into an update soon.

[drvista]

i have managed to find another fix one is permanent
failed to initialize hal!
the solution I found my self is down there
system>>administrtion>>services>>>system dbus
best solution is change periority into 10 intead of 20
or you simply as a temporary fix during this session start it when it fails
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus start
sudo /etc/init.d dbus restart