annoying HAL installation bug and workaround

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 20:53 +0300, MandrakeRoot wrote:
> Hello. I have installed Gnome on my Freebsd 7 using
> 
> pkg_add gnome2  
> 
> which is the recommended  way. In the Gnome Freebsd project documentation .
> 
> The problem is that the hald package is poorly installed by this method 
> and this issue i found also on some obscure older forums. What happens 
> in fact it is that the haldaemon user is not created and hald cannot 
> start. What is annoying is that although i launched hald with the 
> verbose option it did not spit out any error until i decided to launch 
> it overriding the daemonise option.
> 
>  On that older forum it was assumed that it was a bug in the sysinstall 
> procedure but in fact i think it comes from installing from the binaries 
> as i did not install gnome2 from the beginning on my comp . The 
> workaround i used and which is not my discovery was to uninstall the 
> package and reinstall from source. I think this is a bug that should be 
> solved as soon as possible as HAL seems to be fundamental for a good 
> functioning of gnome.

I have never been able to reproduce this problem.  The only way the
haldaemon user would not be created during a package installation is if
PACKAGE_BUILDING was set in the environment.  This variable is not set
by the pkg_* tools, but it is set by sysinstall.

If you ran pkg_add from a shell outside of sysinstall, and did not have
PACKAGE_BUILDING defined in your environment, you should have had the
haldaemon user created.

> 
> Strangely another issue was suddenly solved . I had not been able 
> previously to access the System/Administration menus, but after i 
> installed HAL again from source i was able to enter the menus which had 
> been previously responding with a " you are not authorised ,blah , 
> blah...." message.

The system Administration tools are currently broken on FreeBSD.  Fixing
these tools is one of the proposed Summer of Code projects as well as a
general Idea.

Joe

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