dbus/hal in freebsd 7.2 hangs X11

[Giuseppe Pagnoni]

Hi all,

I am trying to use hal/dbus on a i386 machine with FreeBSD 7.2 (ports
updated to the latest tree snapshot as of yesterday), but despite
spending a full day looking up the handbook, faq, and google, I cannot
make it work properly.  More specifically, when I  use either xfce4 or
xmonad after having enabled dbus/hald in rc.conf:

hald_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"

both window managers become very unresponsive and hang as if hal was
trying to access/mount something.  For example, the terminal may take
*seconds* to display typed in characters and in xfce if you click on
the desktop icons for home directory etc., they don't open up at all
in the thunar file manager (they do though, if you right click on them
and choose 'open').

I read on the freebsd/gnome/halfaq that you should not have in your
/etc/fstab entries that are supposed to be used by hal, so I commented
out the lines for cdrom and flash USB drive in fstab:

# Device		Mountpoint	FStype	Options		Dump	Pass#
/dev/ad6s1b		none		swap	sw		0	0
/dev/ad6s1a		/		ufs	rw		1	1
/dev/ad6s1e		/tmp		ufs	rw		2	2
/dev/ad6s1f		/usr		ufs	rw		2	2
/dev/ad6s1d		/var		ufs	rw		2	2
#/dev/acd0		/cdrom		cd9660	ro,noauto	0	0
# Changed the above for the following (ATAPI-CAM)
#/dev/cd0		/mnt/cdrom	cd9660	ro,noauto	0	0
#/dev/da0s1		/mnt/flash	msdosfs rw,noauto	0	0
# For linux compat
linproc    /usr/compat/linux/proc  linprocfs   rw  0   0
# For VirtualBox, truss(1)
proc            /proc       procfs  rw  0    0

However, this produces no improvement.

Also, following the instruction in the mentioned FAQ, I added the
following lines to the /usr/local/etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf file:

<match action="org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable">
  <match user="giuseppe">
    <return result="yes"/>
  </match>
</match>

alas, with no improvement either...


Before trying to use hal (which I needed for VirtualBox), I had
changed system settings for making the flash USB drive and CD-rom user
mountable, following the instructions in the handbook at:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/usb-disks.html

that is:
    1) adding myself to the operator group
    2) adding the following lines to /etc/devfs.rules
         [localrules=5]
         add path 'cd*' mode 0660 group operator
         [localrules=6]
         add path 'da*' mode 0660 group operator
   3) enable devfs.rules(5) in /etc/rc.conf:
         devfs_system_ruleset="localrules"
   4) adding the line to /etc/sysctl.conf
          vfs.usermount=1
   5) create user accessible mount points:
        mkdir /mnt/cdrom /mnt/flash
        chown giuseppe:giuseppe /mnt/cdrom /mnt/flash


It seems to me that this should not have any relevance for the
misbehavior of hal/dbus, but I am reporting it here just in case there
is some weird interaction that I am not aware of.

I am kind of stumped at this point, I would be very grateful is
somebody has any suggestion to share.

thanks in advance!

    giuseppe