On my Debian system hald fails to start randomly. Logs do not show any errors.
When I restart it and it does start, the output looks like this:
root@LAPTOP:~# /etc/init.d/hal restart
Restarting Hardware abstraction layer: hald.
root@LAPTOP:~#
When I restart it and it does NOT start, the output looks like this:
root@LAPTOP:~# /etc/init.d/hal restart
Restarting Hardware abstraction layer: haldroot@LAPTOP:~#
As you can see in the latter case some expected output (".\n") is missing. Also, the return code is 1 instead of 0 which clearly indicates a failure.
I tried the same quite a few times and it's completely random. What could be the problem?