HAL daemon
 

What does "Starting HAL daemon " mean? This statement, followed by a delay of a few minutes has only recently been appearing.

from man hald

The HAL daemon detects devices present in the system and provides the org.freedesktop.Hal service through D-BUS.

While this is your answer, I'm going to guess it may not make any more sense to you. I don't know that I can explain it very well, so hopefully someone else can chime in.

Basically, it is scanning the system to see what devices are present, and sends that information to Dbus. Dbus is a way for processes to communicate with each other.

Below is a snippet from wikipedia on dbus, if it still doesn't make sense, hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I in this area will chime in.



D-Bus is an inter-process communication (IPC) system[2] with three architectural layers:

* A library, libdbus, that allows two applications to connect to each other and exchange messages.
* A message bus daemon executable, built on libdbus, that multiple applications can connect to. The daemon can route messages from one application to zero or more applications.
* Wrapper libraries based on particular application frameworks.

D-Bus is designed for two specific cases:

* Communication between desktop applications in the same desktop session; to allow integration of the desktop session as a whole, and address issues of process lifecycle.
* Communication between the desktop session and the operating system, where the operating system would typically include the kernel and any system daemons or processes.

Hal
 

lots of information on HAL here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer

the short answer is that it detects what hardware you have and provides an interface to the kernel. this is a gooooood thing :-)

(DON'T DISABLE HAL!)