Hi, new to the forums, so I'm LOI Kratong, nice to meet y'all.

I have just built my own pc, I've got an Asus A8N-e motherboard in there with an AMD Athlon64 proceessor. I've installed slackware as a secondary operating system (gotta have Windows for work ) I've been trying to get both the sound drivers to work and also the usb ports don't seem to be recognised. For example I plug my usb memory key thingy in, and try running 'lsusb' as I've seen on other sites. This doesn't work, it shows two ports which are permanantly empty, and doesn't recognise the other four.

I've tried the LinuxDrivers that came with the board, but they keep giving an error message telling me that they are 64bit drivers, and I'm only running a regular 32bit Slackware distro. Has anyone got a clue about making it work?

My advice would be to download the latest kernel from http://kernel.org and compiling your own. You might as well take every little advantage of your hardware you can get anyway

Sorry, new to Linux, but I'm sure I could find information on how to compile my own kernel, I'm just curious as to what this would achieve?

Most of the extra ports will be deactivated. Check the BIOS or jumper setting to make sure these extra ports are activated. Some manufactures includes a hub to increase the number of USB ports. The kernel does not like USB hubs.

The next latest stable kernel will provide support for newer devices. Also the new kernel may provide more reliable software to handle present hardware that the kernel already supports. Since you are new to Linux, I suggest do not attempt to configure and compile a new kernel.

BTW, I hate motherboards that uses active heatsinks (heatsinks cooled with some help of a fan) for the chipset because they eventually fail. When they fail, it is hard to replace it even when using long PCIe boards. A small profile active heatsink is hard to find. Also chipset active heatsinks are noisy and they produce a hot spot right over the spindle of the fan. I recommend motherboards with heat pipe cooling because they provide better cooling from the help of the CPU fan, they are more reliable, and they do not create hot spots. nForce4 chipsets gets very, very hot.

Well, you've build your own computer so obviously you know the hardware well. You've picked Slackware as your distribution, arguably indicating that you are interested to know how things work. Compiling your own kernel would give you valuable experience and knowledge about how linux works with your hardware. It's also not as tough as some people make it out to be (just like building your own computer isn't so tough).

As a side benefit, as Electro mentioned, you may get support for something that's not supported in an earlier kernel.

Ok cheers guys. I'll have a dig around to see if it's a jumper or BIOS issue, otherwise I'll maybe try compiling my own kernel. I come from a programming background, so I'm sure I can handle it

If that all fails, I'll come and let you know!

Argh! I've just moved house and have a dodgy internet that's gonna need fixing. So can anyone suggest other fixes that may work, I'm having trouble downloading the kernel.

Could you post the output of "dmesg | grep usb", "lsmod" and "/sbin/lspci"?

Sure.

dmesg | grep usb:
usb-uhci.c: $Revision: 1.275 $ time 18:53.41 June 5 2005
usb-uhci.c: High Bandwith mode enabled
usb-uhci.c: v1.275: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver

Actually, there's quite a lot of info coming from these commands, and I can't get it into the web browser (using a different computer for the internet).

In /proc/bus/usb/devices I can see the name of the usb stick when it's plugged in, so it is being recognised, I just can't seem to mount it. How can I tell what the device name is, e.g. hda1?

Depending on your kernel it might be available on /dev/sd? or /dev/ub/? - the easiest way to tell is to check the tail of /var/log/messages. Since you're using a stock kernel it's most likely on /dev/sd? since I don't believe Pat is enabling the USB Block Driver. If you don't have any other scsi or virtual scsi drives (like a sata HDD) then it should be /dev/sda.

Unfortunately I do have a sata harddrive, parition a bit to.

sda1: Windows
sda2: swap
sda3: Linux
sda4: some error message saying it doesn't exist or is a bad block - same message all the way up...

In that case your USB drive would most likely be sdb (with 1 partition on sdb1). When you plug the device in, and run "tail /var/log/messages" it should say something like the following:You'll notice that there was 5 seconds between when I first put the device in to when it was assigned block device /dev/sdb. I also have a sata HDD, which uses sda.

If you're having problems with sda4, then perhaps you should remove its entry from /etc/fstab or give it the noauto option. Unless of course it's an important partition... but if it was I would expect there to be a number of other problems.

edit: for some reason I had indicated that my SATA HDD uses hda, when of course it's sda.

Ah I see, had to go away for a few days but will definately try this when I get back to my box. Thanks for all the help people!