[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#792398: Bug#792398: hald fails to start

[Martin Pitt]

Hey Karsten,

Karsten Sperling [2015-07-15 17:21 +1200]:
> Now that I've got it running (and my family can watch on demand TV again
> ;-) I might have a look if I can trace how the flash plugin is interacting
> with HAL and if it's possible to stub out the relevant calls somehow via
> either a fake hal service or client library. I've CCed in Bart Martens in
> case he has any thoughts on this issue? It would be nice if DRM video in
> flashplugin-nonfree would "just work" for normal users without having to
> install a custom HAL build by hand.

I *think* pretty much the only thing that the DRM plugin wants from
hal is accessing the system's serial number. This is normally only
readable for root for privacy reasons:

  -r-------- 1 root root 4096 Jul 15 06:53 /sys/class/dmi/id/product_serial

But IIRC hal made that public via a property. So it might be enough to
just create a little stub for this, using python-dbusmock or a little
libhal stub which you initialize once with your system serial number.
But this is just a faint memory/conjecture, it might need something
entirely different.

Apparently arch has a stub for this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Flash_DRM_content#Using_the_modified_libhal_stub
but I haven't looked into it at all. (TBH, I'd never trust any
networking-related product which hasn't been updated for a decade and
still requires hal..)

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)