Comment 24 for bug 81670

I got the same error with Feisty beta, after a clean install on its own disk and an update (350 packages). After the clean install, no error, and Feisty could see my usb camera. After the upgrade, the "failed to initialize HAL" error came up as it did for many of you other folks, and the camera was not seen.

This workaround got rid of it for me:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure hal -- I got a message that socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket did not exist. Checking, I found that the whole directory /var/run/dbus was missing. Then I made one like the one on my other system, running Edgy:

sudo mkdir /var/run/dbus
sudo chown messagebus:messagebus /var/run/dbus

Then I told dbus-daemon to make a message bus with the standard configuration file, and re-configured hal:

sudo dbus-daemon --system
sudo dpkg-reconfigure hal

On reboot, the problem had gone away, and Feisty was able once more to see my camera.

"Well," I thought, "must have been that missing directory." So, I removed /var/run/dbus and all in it, then rebooted. No HAL failure this time! And, there was /var/run/dbus belonging to messagebus:messagebus, and populated with a pid and a socket.

HTH.