Re: boot error

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer+debian@icfo.es>]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 21:25:29 -0400, Frank McCormick wrote:
> For the past few weeks I've been seeing an error message fly by (doesn't
> seem to affect anything) and I curious what's going on.
> 
> the message is:
> 
> dbus unknown username "haldemon" in message bus configuration file.

It should be "haldaemon". (I assume this is just a typo since you
probably could not copy/paste the message directly.) The relevant
configuration file is /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf:

$ grep -A2 haldaemon /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf
  <!-- Only root or user haldaemon can own the HAL service -->
  <policy user="haldaemon">
    <allow own="org.freedesktop.Hal"/>
  </policy>

> I'm running Sid...so it shouldn't surprise me :)

Hald, the daemon that manages the Hardware Abstraction Layer, used to
run as the system user "hal". About a year ago (version 0.5.7.1-1) this
was changed to user "haldaemon" (maybe to free "hal" as a name for
normal users). It seems that this transition was not carried out
correctly on your system. The post-installation script of the hal
package is supposed to create the haldaemon user and group if they do
not exist. You can check if the user exists:

$ grep hal /etc/passwd
hal:x:112:112:Hardware abstraction layer,,,:/var/run/hal:/bin/false
haldaemon:x:104:115:Hardware abstraction layer,,,:/var/run/hal:/bin/false

(As you can see, my 4 year old installation still has the legacy "hal"
 user. I should probably delete it...)

-- 
Regards,            | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
          Florian   |