June 26 2007

Ubuntu Error: Hal failed to initialize & udev address already in use – Solution

This is more for me in case it ever happens again. My system froze up while doing some stupid stuff (namely pressing keys I shouldn’t be pressing) so i force-rebooted it (aka: kicked the surge protector). When I re-booted I got the “Hal failed to initialize” message which is apparently pretty common and was supposed to be a pain in the ass to fix.

Theres a few common solutions:

Every Flavour Beans mentions its either a login timing (GDM) issue, or a samba auto-mount issue. The solution there was to either: a) disable all samba shares (I’m not 100% if they meant temporarily or forever — either way, this was a last resort since I hate this kind of stuff) and b) disabling automatic logins through gnome’s GDM.

I didn’t have auto-login enabled, so I figured “what the hell” and set it to auto-login with a 10 second timer. When I re-logged I didn’t get the HAL error, but I also didn’t get my auto mounted drives back. Shit. Next.

I decided to poke around a bit more to see what the bigger picture is. I knew it couldn’t be a big issue since I wasn’t installing/configuring/etc. at the time of the crash — something just got “stuck.” I stumbled upon another site which mentioned running sudo /usr/sbin/hald --daemon=no --verbose=yes to view the output.

After running that I got a suspicious message pointing to the real issue: Error binding udev_event socket: Address already in use. Damn udev. Anyways, I tossed up a sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart and re-booted. Lo and behold – all is well.

(Again, this post is more for my future reference in case I get this error again)