Ice9 wrote:hal is installed and the daemon is running but no icon appears when plugging in a usb device.
is there perhaps a flag I need to activate in a config file?
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with gnome stuff because we don't even have gnome installed, only the libraries needed to run gimp, grip and some other programs.
Actually I think it has everything to do with the gnome stuff (or desktop specific stuff in general). The gnome-volume-manager is the thing that does this within GNOME (reasonably certain of this):
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/gno ... me-manager
gnome-volume-manager is a GNOME daemon that acts as a policy agent in top of the kernel, udev, d-bus and HAL. It listens to HAL events and reacts with user-configurable actions. Currently it supports automount of new media and hot-plugged devices, autorun, autoplay for CDs and DVDs, and automatic camera management. It is expected to be simple and free of polling and other evil hacks.
This would seem to support the theory of gnome-volume-manager, hal, and dbus being needed:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_gnome-volume-manager
If you have it installed you should have a GUI app to configure your preferences called "gnome-volume-properties" that looks a little like this:
In fact that image comes from a document that looks like it would be very helpful to you:
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/hal/
Now I assume all of this is desktop specific. This would be the GNOME way. If you do not use GNOME you would have to find out the way of whatever desktop environment you are using. Maybe I could help find that as well but I don't know what you are using. The reason it has to be DE speicifc is because each DE has a different way of displaying icons on the desktop.