Comment 85 for bug 149076

Thank you, Schily. That's excellent advice.

This might not be the proper place to discuss this, but I'd thought that Karmic dropped hald for a lot of things. From the technical overview (http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta#hal%20deprecation)

hal deprecation

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta's underlying technology for power management, laptop hotkeys, and handling of storage devices and cameras maps has moved from "hal" (which is in the process of being deprecated) to "DeviceKit-power", "DeviceKit-disks" and "udev". When testing Ubuntu 9.10 Beta, please be alert for regressions in those areas and report any bugs you find.

I assume your advice is still excellent, but it's very curious to me that hald would misbehave like this and only just be replaced.