I'm playing with Debian Etch, and the only way I can figure out how to use my USB stick is to run the mount command manually as root in a console. But then only root can copy files, making it a bit of a pain.
In Mandriva 2007 Spring, the same USB stick is recognised when I plug it in, and a window pops up asking whether to mount it or not. Similarly to unmount it in Mandriva I just click on the KwikDisk task tray icon and select the device to disconnect. I can't find anything similar in Etch.

Am I missing something? Do I need to manually enter an fstab entry for this USB stick (and extra entries for other USB sticks I might use?), or is there some cool add-on or trick which manages the mounting/unmounting as well as Mandriva does?

I've had both Etch and Lenny on my laptop (Gnome), and all of my USB drives were automatically mounted with an icon on the desktop. What kernel are you using? What does dmesg say when you attach them?

Kernel:
Output from dmesg:

There are no icons on the desktop, but when I go to my home directory I see the drive listed on the left as "IOMEGA UMni128MB". So I double click on that and it says "Unable to mount the selected volume" - "libhal-storage.c 1401 : info: called libhal_free_dbus_error but dbuserror was not set.
process 3745: applications must not close shared connections - see dbus_connection_close() docs. this is a bug in the application.
error: could not execute pmount".

But when I mount /dev/sdb1/mnt/stick/ from a root console, it mounts fine and I can read and write to it (as root).

Are you a member of the "storage" group? (I think this is the way it's called in Debian).
And anyway, you can always do a "cat /etc/group" to find out.
It may also help adding yourself to the "dbus" and "hal" groups- if they exist.

IIRC, I had to adjust the group settings in Debian Etch back then in order to use USB-Sticks correctly.

I've never had that problem, but I use a k7 kernel.

You may want to have a look at this bug report: bugs.debian.org

It suggest updating your system with the latest kernel, udev, hal, libhal1,
libhal-storage1, dbus, libdbus-*

make sure that dbus and hal are actually running too.

Haven't got one called "storage" in /etc/groups, or usb or dbus. There is one called haldaemon, and I'm not a member of it. Do I need to be?

I've updated everything, and checked those packages match the latest version. Still no change.

Hmmm. If I go to "Services" under Desktop -> Administration, then dbus and hal aren't listed. How would I add them and start them?

Are you using the most recent kernel (many users don't know about Debian backports). Please read these instructions: backports.org

Then update your kernel, etc., and let us know if that helps? If it doesn't, please give the output of

I added the backports as instructed, but apart from giving a warning about some missing signature and an update to libxine1 it did nothing. No new kernel, no new hal / dbus / anything else.
The output of uname -r is similar to the output of uname -a given earlier, ie "2.6.18-6-686".

Solved The answer was that I didn't belong to the plugdev group. With that group added, nautilus pops up showing the contents of the stick automatically, without even a prompt, and I get an icon on the desktop as you said - perfect!
Not sure why I didn't get that group, maybe there were some cunning options which I missed.

Also as a bonus, i fixed the annoyance that my laptop touchpad was horribly slow under Debian - I had to scrabble and scrabble just to move the pointer across the screen. But I looked at my xorg.conf from Mandriva and copied over the following lines:
Option "MinSpeed" "0.8"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.0"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.015"
into Debian's xorg.conf, and everything is much nicer, much more sensitive! Not sure which of those three did the trick but they looked speed-related so I put them all in