Hal, does it really work? and if so, what exactly is it supposed to achieve?
 

Having read with interest the Hal documentation, and thought this is the way to go, I have downloaded all neccessary files and programs to get Hal running. All seems to be fine, but I don't see the point. Either with, or without Dbus/Hal/Howl et al running as daemons on my box, there is absolutely NO difference to the detection/mounting of my removable media. I followed this link to the letter http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=DBUS, and all I have succeeded in doing so far is to waste a grest deal of time.
So, am I expecting to much, or worse, completely missing the point?

My only experience with HAL is on my Redhat box at work (RHEL4). It only manages to annoy me by installing printers that are already installed. I prefer to make my own decisions about when to install a print queue---just a quirk, I guess.
I do want to know more about auto-detection of HW, so I'll sit here and help you absorb the resident wisdom.....;)

Well, HAL and D-BUS don't actually do anything with the media and you didn't mention having a volume manager installed, so what did you expect? They just pass messages to other programs telling them that something has changed. Unless you have another program listening for those messages, you're obviously not going to see anything.

As for the media:/ IOslave, I always thought it was pretty much useless, so it's not worth the trouble to set up HAL and D-BUS just for that. However, the volume manager that comes wth KDE 3.5 is a different story. It responds to HAL events such as inserting a CD or USB drive and can prompt you for an action based on the type of disk, e.g. mount a data disk or rip MP3s from an audio disk. It's really quite handy.