This is a little random... Upstart technically just runs hal the same way that sysvinit used to, except for one small detail ... the stdin/out/err of the init script will be /dev/null instead of /dev/console.
Try adding "console output" to /etc/event.d/rc2 and see whether that fixes the problem. No idea why it should, of course ** Bug 58760 has been marked a duplicate of this bug -- security policy error with hald after latest updates https://launchpad.net/bugs/58165 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs