Mounting USB stuff

["Michael S. Peek" <peek@tiem.utk.edu>]

Hello users,

I'm a n00b who's trying to figure out how to mount USB stuff.  I hear hal will
do just that, but when I run "lshal", I get the following error:

   # lshal
   lshal version 0.4.7
   libhal.c 644 : Error connecting to system bus: Failed to connect to socket
/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
   error: hal_initialize failed

Trying to track this down, I find that dbus is not running.  I have no idea
what dbus is, but when I try to start it up, I get a segmentation fault:

   # invoke-rc.d dbus-1 start
   Starting system message bus: /etc/init.d/dbus-1: line 84: 16462 Segmentation
fault      start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --user
$DAEMONUSER --exec $DAEMON -- --system $PARAMS
   invoke-rc.d: initscript dbus-1, action "start" failed.

Isn't this, like, a bad thing?

Am I barking up the wrong tree by persuing hal/dbus to mount USB stuff for me?

I'm running the latest stable Debian, sarge.

Thanks for any help you can give,

Michael Peek