Arch Linux

whaler

Member

From: Oslo, Norway

Registered: 2008-03-25

Posts: 323

Upgrade quality and Hal - again

Upgrading Arch is a hit or miss operation. Usually the kernel is not panicking, usually the settings in Firefox and other apps are carried over, quite frequently even Hal is working after an upgrade. Too often, though, this is not true.

On my system, Hal has intermittently been working fine, partly or not at all after upgrades over the last year. Today it stopped working again, so I searched this site and found this suggestion for the .xinitrc file:

exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session ck-launch-session startkde

This helped me to at least get access to a dvd, but not to unmount/eject it. Dolphin displays a msg about the device being busy, and here are some tidbits from the command line:

[pelagos@blabla ~]$ umount /media/Trav_20091128
umount: /media/Trav_20091128 is not mounted (according to mtab)

[pelagos@blabla ~]$ ls /media
Trav_20091128     cd  dvd  fl

[pelagos@blabla ~]$ eject
/sbin/umount.hal: Unmounting /media/Trav_20091128    failed: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Busy: umount: /media/Trav_20091128   : device is busy.
eject: unmount of `/media/Trav_20091128   ' failed
[pelagos@blabla ~]$

Something in the system is obviously aware of the mounted dvd and, funnily, after several unsuccessful tries, the dvd is magically released and ejected. As if a time-lock had been set...

The latest upgrade also changed all the fonts on my system, including Firefox, and Firefox has even lost my passwords. Not exactly what you want if you happen to have work to do...