[gentoo-user] hald failed to start

Bummer.  I upgraded X and followed all the steps, it did come up, but
hald won't start, so I have to ssh in and kill X to get my screen back
even as a tty.  Seems a shame to go thru all that X upgrade stuff and
have something else fail.  Here are the versions:

  sys-apps/hal-0.5.13-r2
  x11-base/xorg-server-1.6.3.901-r2

This is the only error message in /var/log/messages:

  Sep 19 02:32:36 crowfix /etc/init.d/hald[4485]: ERROR: hald failed to start

Nothing I can see in dmesg.  The X log is pretty unhelpful:

  (EE) config/hal: couldn't initialise context: unknown error (null)

This is a ~amd64 system.  It fails the same on both 2.6.30-r6 and
2.6.31.

I guess what I would really like is some way to get more info on why
hald won't start.  I ran it manually with --verbose=yes --use-syslog
and got 8699 lines of syslog, only 9 of which had "error" in them.  7
of those were for lid, battery, etc -- laptop stuff.  Only 2 looked
like real errors:

  Sep 19 02:46:45 crowfix hald[5888]: 02:46:45.936 [E] hald_runner.c:671: Error running 'hald-addon-storage': org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Disconnected: Connection was disconnected before a reply was received
  Sep 19 02:46:45 crowfix hald[5888]: 02:46:45.944 [E] hald_runner.c:671: Error running 'hald-addon-hid-ups': org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Disconnected: Connection is closed

Does this mean anything to somebody?  Is there a better way to get
more useful info from hald?  Did I forget to read some update notice?

-- 
            ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._.
     Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@×××××××.com
  GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E  6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933
I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o