[Bug 43962] Hald won't start after latest updates

[Matthew Flower]

Public bug reported:

Affects: hal (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Normal
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed


Description:
I installed tonight's batch of updates, at the end of which Ubuntu
requested a reboot.

Once I rebooted, received the familiar splash screen of Ubuntu.  Once
the startup got to the "Starting Hardware Abstraction Layer Hald", I ran
into some trouble.  I received the message "select() to /dev/rtc to wait
for clock tick times out"

Once I got into X, I got an internal error about Hald not being able to
start once I logged in.

I attempted to roll back to an earlier kernel (2.6.15-20-386).  It
seemed to have the same behavior.

I loaded system rescue cd, and I noticed that after it booted, I was
able to run "date" and see the correct time.  I'm assuming it fetched
this from the hardware clock, which seems to indicate that my hardware
clock is okay.

I googled around a bit, and I found some advice about setting
HWCLOCKPARS="-r --directisa" in /etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh.  Neither
this, nor settings it to "--directisa" seemed to help.

Thanks for any workaround you can offer as you research a bug fix.

-- 
Hald won't start after latest updates
https://launchpad.net/bugs/43962