New with archLinux and problems with HAL daemon, fails...

I am using ArchLinux 32bits, I moved from Debian Lenny 64bits, tired of the flash, java and other 64bits "issues", even if they were working, but I was just "tired" of it and curious to try 32bits, it has been 3 years without trying any 32bits distribution. I have been working the last two years with gentoo and debian/lenny

I was going to install gentoo 32bits but I remember ArchLinux and that it's supposed to be "like" Gentoo without compiling time and that it has its own package manager, pacman instead of emerge, and that in fact, it works pretty fast too.

And I have to say I am really impressed, why? just because how long the installation took yesterday, just un hour after I started I had xorg and gnome working, almost at "full" speed.

Issues:

-The CpuFreq, frist I tried centrino_speedstep, Then I read somewhere it had to be acpi_cpufreq, so I change the module name to load, now it loads it but the frequency is still at full speed (2.2Ghz) for both cores, maybe I am doing something wrong.

-And second and more important to me, the hal daemon, it fails, it doesn't start, dbus does it but hal doesn't. Is it some new bug with gnome 2.24?

Thanks a lot!

 

I have Arch because they have a really great wiki set up. Check out the cpufreq wiki:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_Frequency_Scaling

You need to load the governor modules for cpufreq as well.

I'm not sure why HAL is failing to load. I am using Arch x64 and Gnome 2.24, and it works perfectly. Is there anything in the log files?

 

No, there is nothing, It just fails, should it leave any message? I checked all of them with "grep" and I cannot see nothing.

Thanks for the other thing

 

Just to make sure, you have hal in the rc.conf dameons array, right? As long as you have hal, it and dbus will start automatically (and acpid too, if it's installed), but hal won't start if only dbus is specified.

Try starting hal manually without the script in rc.d, and see what kind of errors you get that way.

 

Yeah of course I have it like that.

Trying to start hal manually:

 

Ok, sorry, this is whats going on, no idea the meaning of it

The thing is mdstat refers to some raid thing, why does it check it? mmm how can I delete that?

 

There's a possible workaround at the end of this thread.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56538

Have you made any custom policies?

 

Nop! I mean I did after it was already failing and already try to delete it and it didn't help.

I think I found the solution with:

"/proc/mdstat: No such file or directory"

But I don't know how to fix this, I know mdstat has something to do with raid, which btw I don't have so... any idea how can I get rid of that?

 

I think the 'md' module provides /proc/mdstat, so you could try loading that. You could also try removing ntfs-3g and falling back on the read only (or experimental write) kernel support. It might be a different policy that's causing the problem for you, though, I really don't know. It definitely looks to be policykit related, Arch is having some issues with it's implementation.

 

I've a "final" question

When I entered the kernel configuration I saw that EVERYTHING, at device drivers, where mark as Module or *, but how I say, EVERYTHING.

That has something to do with the MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes" at rc.conf? Maybe be I will reinstall the system (I have /home and / separate partitions so I don't loose that much in time, in around hour and a half I will have everything reinstalled) with that option changed to "no" So it doesn't load tons of modules...

But is there any way no enter kernel configuration during the installation like in gentoo?

And how can I see the boot log? because now loading the md module hal "works" (it gives some warning but now it mounts the usb disks), I would like to see that warning because I don't have time to read it during booting.

I tried to read how to compile using /usr/src/linux* way with ArchLinux, but I don't get it, maybe be I am too stupid

 

You have logs like daemon.log and everything.log in /var/log. I don't think you'll get much from it, but here are a few methods to allow scrolling through the boot process output. I know I saw a guide that shows you how to get that escape sequence back, but I'm not finding it. I'd just make sure to backup /etc/issue before messing with it, as it's not as easy as just entering the characters.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Post_Installation_Tips#End_of_Boot_Process

I seriously doubt your problem is with the kernel. It may be with the initrd, but I think it's more likely hal or policykit. If you do want to compile your kernel, ABS does provide a method to let pacman manage it:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Custom_Kernel_Compilation_with_ABS

The only reason there are so many modules is so that pretty much any hardware will work, while minimizing the size of the kernel image. Don't worry about that, most any distro that doesn't have you configure your own kernel requires that. It doesn't have anything to do with MOD_AUTOLOAD, that's completely userspace, and Arch only has one kernel regardless. The only thing that setting changes is, if it's disabled you need to manually specify every module in the MODULES array. Also, there would be no difference between just changing the setting in rc.conf, and reinstalling. If you want to rerun hwdetect, you can install it from the repo (if it's not installed by default yet). Or if you want to change what's in your initrd (which is why it asks you about RAID and SCSI and stuff during install, I believe) there's a file in /etc that manages that and who's comments will tell you how to rebuild the image.

I don't have an Arch install right now, so I'm sorry I can't go into more detail for you in places.

 

Its ok, thanks for all that info

 

Now its working after adding md module in rc.conf

But I have a final question , pacman doesn't find "pommed" package, maybe is not support anymore or I have something configured wrong in pacman.conf, here is my file:

 

If I interpret your archlinux.fr entry right, you have yaourt installed? I'm just asking because you mentioned pacman and not yaourt...

If so, try to get it with "yaourt -S pommed". Yaourt is not just a nice text-based frontend for pacman, it is also capable of fetching unsupported AUR packages (like pommed, for example) which aren't hosted on the official repositories.

If you don't have yaourt, just install it using pacman. You won't regret it

 

Thanks a lot , I didn't know yaourt, now its installed and pommed also too

Thanks man!, I am in love with Arch, dammed so fast so good for me