The VideoLAN Forums

I have just upgraded to KDE 3.5 which, through dependancies, meant an upgrade to HAL-0.5.5.1 and DBUS-0.50 as well.

Now when I start VLC-0.8.4 I get the error: "vlc: error while loading shared libraries: libhal.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

There is no libhal.so.0 file with this version of hal.

Doing a search here suggests that many FC4 people had the same issue and it was solved through downgrading libhal to a far earlier version.

In this case it is hard to downgrade hal because the latest version is needed for proper KDE 3.5 operation.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to resolve this error short of downgrading everything back to KDE 3.4?

A bit of research has shown hal is pretty optional. Many people have compiled their systems without it.

The solution turned out to be passing the --disable-hal flag to the compile job.

With Gentoo this was achieved by