Comment 2 for bug 777514

This appears to be down to a change in the postinst script included in halevt-0.1.6.2-1.3. The script attempts to restart the hal daemon:

invoke-rc.d --quiet hal restart

This fails as "/etc/init.d/hal" does not exist.

The following fixed this for me:

mkdir halevt_replace
cd halevt_replace
cp /var/cache/apt/archives/halevt_0.1.6.2-1.3_amd64.deb .
ar -p halevt_0.1.6.2-1.3_amd64.deb control.tar.gz | tar xz
sed "s/invoke-rc.d --quiet hal restart/# invoke-rc.d --quiet hal restart/" postinst -i
tar cfz control.tar.gz ./config ./templates ./postinst ./prerm ./postrm ./conffiles ./md5sums ./control
ar r halevt_0.1.6.2-1.3_amd64.deb control.tar.gz
dpkg -i halevt_0.1.6.2-1.3_amd64.deb
# Finally clean up
cd ..
rm -rf halevt_replace