I was trying to get hald to work on my pc, without success, until I saw that haldaemon couldn't access the devices, since it didn't have enough permissions. Standard, the permissions of the devices are -rw-rw---- and member of the groups disk or cdrom, depending on the device of course. Adding the user haldaemon to the groups made it work. Using hal-0.5.5.1-r3. # emerge --info Portage 2.0.53 (default-linux/x86/2005.0, gcc-3.4.4, glibc-2.3.5-r2, 2.6.14-gentoo-r5 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.14-gentoo-r5 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.12.0_pre14 ccache version 2.3 [enabled] dev-lang/python: 2.3.5, 2.4.2 sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.12 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r6 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config /usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/splash /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache confcache distlocks fixpackages sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo http://distfiles.gentoo.org http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" LANG="nl_BE" LC_ALL="nl_BE.UTF-8" LINGUAS="nl en" MAKEOPTS="-j3" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/overlays/my_portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 X alsa apache2 apm arts audiofile avi bash-completion berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 cddb cdparanoia cdr clamd crypt cups curl dbus directfb double-precision dvd dvdr dvdread emboss encode exif expat ext-doc ext-dvi ext-lyx ext-openoffice ext-pdf ext-ppt ext-ps ext-tex ext-xls fam ffmpeg flac foomaticdb gd gdbm gif gimpprint glut gmp gpgme gpm hal icu idn imagemagick imap imlib innodb ipv6 java jpeg junit kde kdeenablefinal kdexdeltas lcms libclamav libg++ libvisual libwww lm_sensors lua mad madwifi mhash mikmod mmx mng moznomail moznoxft mp3 mpeg mplayer musicbrainz mysql ncurses network nls nntp nptl nsplugin nvidia ogg oggvorbis openexr opengl oss pam pam_console pcre pdflib perl php pic png python qt quicktime rar readline samba sdl slang slp smtp spell sql sse sse2 ssl stencil-buffer subject-rewrite subtitles subversion svg svga symlink tcpd tetex threads tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode usb visualization vorbis win32codecs wmf xattr xine xml xml2 xscreensaver xsl xv xvid zeroconf zlib linguas_nl linguas_en userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, LDFLAGS
It is being added to those groups. It's possible you had an old install and it didn't add the permissions until after a restart.
