Volume Manager unresponsive in Gnome and command line

[greymaiden]

Binary package hint: gnome-volume-manager

GUI Side:

System >> Preferences >> Removable Drives and Media

I receive the following error: The "hald" service is required but not currently running. Enable the service and rerun this application, or contact your system administrator.

Note: You need Linux kernel 2.6 for volume management to work.

I might be going about this the wrong way. I'm relatively new to Gnome. I have the latest kernel installed, as well as all the dependencies for hal, hal-device-manager, and gnome-volume-manager. I've scoured the forums and there seem to be quite a few people out there having problems with hal/g-v-m; none of them are exactly the same as mine, but it wouldn't suprise me if the same bug was responsible.

One other note about those forum posts: they aren't getting a lot of action. Nobody seems to have any clue what's going on with hal and his package pals.