I have tried to use mepis,dsl,ubuntu, xubuntu and now red hat.I have temporarily given up getting the first four distro's mentioned to connect to the repository and to read usb thumb drives, but Red Hat does the connection bit no trouble so far.
Red hat 8.0 does everything but does not read thumb drives yet. I'll go with red hat if someone can tell me how to get it to read thumb drives.
I've edited /etc/fstab and added the line :
"/dev/sda /mnt/usb auto sync,noauto,user,exec 0 0"
as there was no mention of sda devices there after I installed it. I rebooted and the usb drive icon showed up but when I opened it all I got was "001, devices, drivers" and not the files I had stored on it. This was the same trouble with damn small linux.
I have spent the last 3 weeks trying to get one distro to work and so far no luck.any ideas will be tried very vigorously. Thanks in advance
regards richag77

22/5/06-Thanks guys, I've got Fedora core 5 ordered. I'm sure it will solve this problem.

You want to read the partition on the "drive" (something like sda1) and not the entire "drive" (sda), try for example;


FYI: RHL8 is old and not supported, in keeping with the Red Hat family try using something that is supported like Fedora Core 4/5 or CentOS 3/4.

It's not clear what you mean by the "repository". And don't ask me to believe any modern distro is unable to read from a thumb drive (USB pen). I simply don't by the idea . For one thing I know newer kernels support most of the newer hardware. I'm using a 1GB pen with a lot of distros without any problem.

There's something you've got to do before you jump and edit fstab. After plugging in your drive run This will print the last 10 lines of the kernel buffer into your console. Go through it and find out which divice is the thumb drive (eg: sda, sdb, etc.) If not found run just the dmesg and look for it. Try to mount the drive using that info. Then use that to edit fstab (Eg: if you got sdb, try sdb1 in fstab) if you want.

If Ubuntu and Mepis fails to automount it maybe you have some special case to handle. So follow the above steps and see.

Ahem..I can't call RH8 modern though . Why do I remember myself and lot of other LQ members always advising people to use newer distros? After RH 8 there were 6 major versions, Fedora Core 5 being the latest. Well, for your problem I'll try to help. But I'm asking once again to use a newer distro if there are no other serious problems.

I never could get RH8 to read (or write) my USB-stick. Search on http://www.linux-usb.org/ showed that it was only working on a kernel newer than the original RH8 one.