Oh my!
I see now what you meant in your original post by "blank page." That is, after reading your last post, I opened Konqueror and drilled my way to
/etc/dbus-1/system.d. I then noticed that
hal.conf was listed as file type
HTML Document. I double-clicked and the file opened directly in Konqueror. The page opened all blank, just as you described.
The reason Konqueror showed a blank page is the file is not actually an HTML file. Konqueror was trying to parse HTML code and there is none. Thus the blank page!
My setup has HTML documents defaulting to opening first in Konqueror, then Firefox, then Kate, etc. Your setup likely is similar. That the file opened blank made sense after I opened the document in Kate and saw the file was not truly an HTML file. The file is an XML file. HTML markup is a subset of XML, which is a subset of SGML.
You next opened the file in Quanta Plus. Well, Quanta is fairly slick about recognizing Document Type Definitions, commonly known as DTDs. As this file is a simple XML file and not an HTML file, Quanta is programmed to try to help the user convert the file to a known DTD. The DTD listed in hal.conf is not recognized by Quanta Plus. That does not mean the declaration is incorrect, only that Quanta does not recognize the declaration. As a side note, you could add this DTD to Quanta Plus if you really wanted to, however. Then you no longer would receive the dialog box you showed in your screen grab.
If you want to see a better example of a well-known DTD declaration, open any web page in a text editor and notice the DTD declaration at the beginning of the file.
But modifying the DTD of hal.conf is not what you wanted. Good thing you restored the file from the original.
Okay, things are making sense with respect to your original post. Your "blank page" mystery is solved. I hope I explained this okay.
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I was then able to access the external HDD from my user account.
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This probably was a coincidence and had nothing to do with your changing the document declaration. I'll guess that after you changed the declaration, the hal daemon simply could no longer parse the file as a "DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration" file. The hal daemon probably saw the new "DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional" declaration and then ignored the file contents.
I'm curious to learn whether you can still access the external disk
after rebooting or restarting the hal daemon.
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At first I tried adding my user account to the plugdev, cdrom, and disk groups from Kuser but that didn't work.
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If I understand correctly you mean that adding the user accounts to those groups did not resolve your problem of accessing the external hard drive. I don't think you meant that you could not use
kuser to add users to groups.
If the latter then you need to run that app as root. When you launch
kuser you should be prompted for the root password. Another way to launch the app is pressing
Alt-F2 to open the
Run box, and then typing
kdesu kuser. The command line gurus will tell you to run the
adduser or
useradd commands, but
kuser is a valid tool to do the same thing. I use
kuser all the time rather than the command line.
If you meant the former then never mind my kuser explanation!
Regardless, you still want those users added to those groups.
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The only question I have left is after adding my account to plugdev and such, was a reboot in order to active it?
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Seldom do you need to reboot a Linux-based system. Sometimes you need to restart services. In this case, just adding the user to the group was sufficient. You might have had to log out and log in to ensure the new group assignment takes hold, but that is all.
