I decided to upgrade to KDE 3.5.6 the other day, and now I can't use my cdrom drive, apparently because HAL doesn't work. When I try to open the drive in KDE (the drive works fine in the console), I get:

I have reinstalled the following packages (all from Kenny Z) in order and checked all their dependencies, and a few hours of googling and looking around hasn't helped much. Also, the dbus daemon is running (I just put "dbus-launch" in my /etc/rc.d/rc.4) according to ps -e.

udev 111
dbus 1.0.2
dbus-glib 0.73
dbus-qt3 0.70
hal 0.5.9
kdase 3.5.6

Running slapt-get seems to indicate that all the important parts of my system are up-to-date. I'm running Slack 11.0 with a 2.6.21.1 kernel on a Dell Inspiron 5150. Everything else works just fine. Any thoughts?

Yep,

You will need to downlaod kdebase source code and compile it yourself with the --with-hal switch

I can do that (I think). I was going with the packaged versions of kde to avoid compiling. Now it seems the solution to getting the packages working is to compile. I don't mind (I learn something every time), but that's a little funny. Did I go wrong somewhere or miss an easier solution?

http://www.linuxpackages.net/pkg_details.php?id=10117

regarding dbus,hal,udev: only use the packages by Ken Zalewski !

Why do people want HAL on Slackware?