i've disable hal as it hangs everytime its on.
 

i've disable hal as it hangs everytime its on.

is it alright to disable it?
what does it really do anyway?

To answer your second question first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_(software)


As for disabling it: depends on your usage patterns, or
how good you are writing udev-scripts. I don't need it
(fluxbox doesn't make use of it), but other people with
larger Desktop Managers may find it helpful.


Cheers,
Tink

thanks. not sure if i really need it though.. but how can i disable it permanently that it wont try to start the hal deamon everytime i boot up?

where can i find the hal scripts?

Sorry, can't answer that - not certain what distro you're using.

Try inquiring with your package manager; have a look (grep) in
the init-directory of your distro.


Foremost you may want to investigate WHY hal hangs your machine.


Cheers,
Tink

i'm not sure why hal deamon hangs too.. :D

i'm using centos 5.5

'man 8 hald' gives you a starting point, see "bugs and debugging": /etc/init.d/haldaemon stop; pkill -9 hald; pgrep -lf hald (do check!); /usr/sbin/hald --daemon=no --verbose=yes 2>&1 | tee /tmp/hald.debug (end with ^C). Now you can read /tmp/hald.debug and maybe post the last 30 lines in BB code tags if the process did error out.

the only thing i see are these...

what does it mean?

What does 'getent passwd haldaemon' return? If it doesn't then run '/usr/sbin/useradd -c 'HAL daemon' -u 68 -s /sbin/nologin -r -d '/' haldaemon 2> /dev/null;' (basically the %preinstall script from 'rpm -q hal --scripts') and try again.

out put after getent passwd haldaemon,

so it did has a user. should i run the command still?

No, shouldn't be necessary. Tell me when your HAL problem started. Right at installing the OS? After updates? After you changed something?

Right after installing the OS.

after it require me to boot up, it hanged. what i did was to longpress the computer button and restart again and manually turning of the hal deamon upon booting up. it then successfully boot up and so i have created my user account.

i tried updating hoping it might work after but still not.

What does 'rpm -q hal ' return?
And 'rpm -ql hal|grep etc/|xargs ls -alZ'?
And 'rpm -Vv hal|grep -v '^\.\{8\}';'?

Is there anything we should know about your machines HW?
Is there anything special wrt devices attached to your machine?
Have you checked the Centos and Red Hat bug trackers for anything recent related to HAL?

for HAL
centOS 5.5 is close so this mjm services page should apply
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-fc6.html

a description of your hardware might help
also DO YOU NEED a OS meant for a headless server ? ( RHEL 5 / CentOS 5 )
if this is a new computer and you do NOT EXPLICITLY NEED rhel 5
then i would suggest -- Linux Mint, or Ubuntu