HAL is Hardware abstraction layer and it loads as part of the boot process. It
should be installed by default but it can be installed separately. It is likely
that by upgrading instead of doing a fresh installation that you had a
dependency problem that prevented HAL from installing completely.

Going the upgrade route is not the best way to get the newer version for
precisely the reason you found out. At some point you are placing the old
alongside the new and it can cause problems. Both 7.04 and 7.10 are dated. It
may be hard for you to resolve this issue as 7.04 will no longer be supported at
the end of the month. It is at the end of its life and 7.10 only goes till next
April.
Whenever possible doing a fresh installation is preferred. There are several
reasons for this, but the biggest one is problems such as yours and then you
don't have a Live CD of the later release to troubleshoot and therefore you must
start over. It is pennywise and pound foolish to try to get a release by
upgrading. If you have a problem you will have to repeat your work and will
probably use more bandwidth in the end. The longer you run a release the more of
a patchwork it becomes and the more likely you will have a problem. This is true
for any OS, Windows included. The only way to avoid this problem is to not
update in the first place and to always install from CD. Placing anything on top
of the old is a problem waiting to happen.
You can try to install HAL through the repositories. Here is a link to what HAL
does and its dependencies: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal

Or one can simply *not upgrade* at all. I'm sticking with 8.04.1 LTS
for awhile.

If one's system is fully functioning and there are both repo and
custom apps installed along with all one's personal files and data,
the hassle time required to backup, re-install, and restore the backup
has to be weighed against the convenience of simply using one's system
(and possibly an auto-upgrade as I did earlier this year).

Frankly, I don't understand the obsession with a 6-month release and
upgrade cycle. Incremental updates should be all that's required as
some other distros and FreeBSD, Solaris and UNIX do and have done for
years.

Blowing-away a system to get and install the "latest and greatest"
seems like an extravagant waste of time to me from my perspective of
having used computers since the early 1960s.

You missed the point. If you go the upgrade route and anything does go wrong you
don't have a disk with the latest release. You must go through the whole process
if you ever need to re-install. That means that all of the downloading was for
nothing and must be done again. If you have the disk then you are only starting
at the midpoint. In your situation, you would have to re-install 7.10 again then
upgrade to where 8.04 starts because you don't have 8.04 on disk.
My point was generally it is best to do a clean installation. Because Linux is
modular you can save your home directory or even better have it reside on a
separate partition and therefore anything you do to the root partition can't
hurt you. Upgrades from disk are a piece of cake if you have your system set up
properly.
I should know. I have 11 Linux partitions for distros plus a home and swap
partition. I install distros and de-install them daily. To date I have never had
to re-do my home directory. I have kept the same one for years and never lost a
piece of data or a setting. I would be hard pressed to set up my Thunderbird
accounts from scratch simply because I never need to. I say this and previous
comments so that people can realize how easy Linux is to install and replace if
need be.
I almost never upgrade. It just isn't worth the hassle to me. I keep the most
recent releases of my favorite distros on disk or save them as ISOs to use with
Unetbootin. If it strikes my fancy I will delete my whole Ubuntu or any other
distro and replace it, just for fun. Call me warped, but it is so easy to
install. There is no need to fear, so why take any chances with placing good on
top of perhaps bad when you don't have to. A clean installation gives you a
fresh start. There is no risk. With an upgrade you take what you get because
like it or not it is a patch work.
Saying that your upgrade went okay so upgrades in general are okay is like
saying that you have never got cancer from smoking so smoking is okay.

Bad assumption. :-) I have CD and DVD ISO images for everything of
interest to me and it takes only a few minutes to burn a CD or DVD
as required.

> My point was generally it is best to do a clean installation.
> Because Linux is modular you can save your home directory or even
> better have it reside on a separate partition and therefore anything
> you do to the root partition can't hurt you. Upgrades from disk are
> a piece of cake if you have your system set up properly.

No disagreement with the above. But then you still need to reinstall
from the repos all the apps that were installed in the just-prior
release.

> I should know. I have 11 Linux partitions for distros plus a home
> and swap partition. I install distros and de-install them daily.
> To date I have never had to re-do my home directory. I have kept
> the same one for years and never lost a piece of data or a setting.
> I would be hard pressed to set up my Thunderbird accounts from
> scratch simply because I never need to. I say this and previous
> comments so that people can realize how easy Linux is to install
> and replace if need be.

Again no disagreement. I assume you have case statements in your
.bashrc or .profile to set different PATH, MANPATH, etc. for each
different distro. There are significant differences between the
multitudinous Linux distros (at least for those of us who use the
command line and develop/test software).

> I almost never upgrade. It just isn't worth the hassle to me. I
> keep the most recent releases of my favorite distros on disk or save
> them as ISOs to use with Unetbootin. If it strikes my fancy I will
> delete my whole Ubuntu or any other distro and replace it, just for
> fun. Call me warped, but it is so easy to install.

We agree on easy installation, but I have some 30-40 computers here,
most with just one OS on them (and some that triple-boot), and I have
to do both work and personal things with them and I don't have the
luxury of blowing-away an OS "just for fun". :-)

> There is no need to fear, so why take any chances with placing good
> on top of perhaps bad when you don't have to. A clean installation
> gives you a fresh start. There is no risk. With an upgrade you take
> what you get because like it or not it is a patch work.

Yet Ubuntu does it correctly. As I've written here several times, I
was *very* impressed with how the 7.10 -> 8.04 went earlier this year.
The entire upgrade was automatic and consumed none of my time -- it
happened while fixing/eating dinner and watching a movie which I
would have done regardless of the upgrade occurring or not.

> Saying that your upgrade went okay so upgrades in general are okay
> is like saying that you have never got cancer from smoking so
> smoking is okay.

I did not write "upgrades in general are OK"; I specifically cited
Ubuntu as having done it correctly. You want to see a nightmare? Look
what's going to be required upgrading Fedora 9 -> Fedora 10. *THAT* is
a case where a new install makes sense (assuming one wants Fedora 10).

I have to keep ISOs and OSs around for most everything. One client's
infrastructure is mostly Fedora 3 (they run 24/7), so I have some
systems into which I can quickly swap-in a disk with that release --
I cannot afford to blow-away old stuff "just in case", and disks are
inexpensive (just bought some new Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives for
$56 each).

The pending upgrade I'm expecting for Solaris 10u5 -> Solaris 10u6 in
a few weeks is expected to be as troublefree as Ubuntu's 7.10 -> 8.04

I admire your efforts "playing" with different distros, and the help
you've provided so many people is, I'm sure, greatly appreciated! I
wish I had the time to do the same, but at my age time is precious.

I like playing with Linux. The more I play the more I learn. I am fortunate to
be home fulltime (pensioner). Linux takes me back to the good old days,
pre-Windows, when you could make your computer do whatever you want. There was
no OS and the computer was yours to treat as you wanted. My first computer was
an Apple II. By today's standards it wasn't much, but it was what a computer
should be. You could treat it like a car. You could look under the hood and soup
it up and make it do whatever you had a mind to do. Everybody's computer was
different and everybody was doing different things with them. I still have it,
but haven't turned it on in years.
My latest distro to enjoy is SimplyMEPIS 8 which runs on kernel 2.6.x.27. It
loads almost as fast as Ubuntu 8.10 and it is snappy. If anyone wants a good KDE
distro based on Debian that can do everything out of the box, they should try it
out. It is very stable, but still in beta (2nd).
I didn't mean to sound critical. It might have looked that way, but it wasn't my
intent. I should proofread more. I want people to develop good practice, so that
we have fewer problems and fresh installations are best for newbies. People on
dialup may be hesitant to download a new release and think that an upgrade will
save time and bandwidth, but that isn't necessarily so. If you have no disk then
you have nothing to fall back on.
Anyway, I think you got what I was saying in the end. I like your knowledgeable
posts. I don't have any expertise other than what has been gained by the school
of hard knocks. I learn by doing and sometimes by learning from mistakes.

Actually, I like the new days a bit better. Typing and compiling miles of
code was a big pain.

I used Commodore products. I taught myself computer languages. It was
interesting, but hard. Basic, Machine Language, Hexadecimal math, Boolean
Algebra.

I knew the future was in communication when I joined some bulletin boards.
It was good to finally share my interest with others.

My first HDD was the size of a boat anchor. 10meg. I shouldn't need a drive
any bigger then that. It cost more then this whole computer did.

I like Linux for many different reasons.

1) It is cheap. If I installed a Microsoft product in my Linux box, the
software would have cost more then the computer.

2) It gives my brain a workout.

3) It doesn't feed the pig. (Refer to 1)

4) I've been running Linux on my old 500 Celeron HP for over a year without
an antivirus program with no problem. Try that with Vista.

5) It is fast.

The best way to deal with installations in my opinion is to install
everything and then back up the whole system.



I was just at the coffee shop with my laptop running Vista. It's
frustrating. It took at least 8 minutes to start up. It took at least 5
minutes to shut down. That uses a considerable amount of battery life. The
whole time I was there, Vista decided to update. My HDD cranked the whole
time I was there. I only got about 1 hour out of a 2 hour battery.

I started in computers in 1966 and have spent my whole working life in
various roles (software programmer, software engineer, applications
programmer, systems analyst, development manager, architect ... and a few
other less definable). I have not been a job that I did not enjoy.

Looking back though, I would love to be able to go back to my role as a
software programmer building a transaction processing system in assembly
language on a CDC 3300 system - if I could only take back with me what I
know now!

I love computers. I enjoy tinkering with them and getting involved in what
goes on in the guts of the operating system. But actually, now that I am
grey and old and retired, my greatest enjoyment is using the little beasts.
Word processing, spreadsheets, email, photo management, and of course
surfing the net.

Linux is great - not necessarily because it is the best ("Best for what?" is
the question that has to be asked), but because it is fun. And because it is
easy to use but tremendously powerful. And because it is (mostly) FOSS. and
that appeals to my anarchistic heart.