I've found that HAL seems to be the only way to generate events when a CD/DVD/Blu-ray is inserted (if you know of a better way, please reply to this question), so I'm trying to get HAL running on my headless 10.04 server. It seems to work okay when I run it manually with sudo hald --daemon=yes --use-syslog.
The problem is that hald does not automatically run on startup (I assume because it's deprecated), and there's no sign of it in /etc/init.d. What's the proper way to get HAL running at startup in Lucid and beyond? And do I have to worry about other things getting screwed up by having this deprecated software around?