Guy's moving away from Red hat to Lindow 4.5 which came free on a magazine front cover , its so easy to install and to use its almost like Windows XP , what is great about this OS is that its base on Linux and if you want to install software any software its just click and run , and thats really it.

anyway back to my main point , Why can't I use my USB flash drive , i just can't see it. and why can't i use my webcam .


one more final problem guy's I have a Panasonic KP 2034 dots martix printer i can perfrom a test page that prints out big font how can i reduce this to its normall size like in Windows XP .


I tel ya what if these small problem are fix i am no way going back to Windows XP

i'm not sure about the other things, but to use a usb flashdrive you need to have the usb-core and uhci-somethingsomething modules loaded, along with the usb-storage module. the first two are almost certainly loaded.

as root open a terminal and type "modprobe usb-storage"
then try to mount /dev/sda1 somewhere, as the usb-storage module lets linux see usb storage devices as scsi drives. to see it in lindow's my computer, you'd probably have to edit some config files or something, i'll leave that to someone who's played with lindows a bit more than i have.

I can't help you with your printer or your webcam (you should probably make a seperate post for each, instead of putting them all in the same big post), but here's some steps to get your flash drive working:

1. Log in as root
2. Run "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" to get a list of devices that interact with your system like SCSI devices (your flash drive should be on the list, because it pretends to be a SCSI device even though it is actually USB). Find your flash drive on the list and get its device name. If you do not get a device name from this, but your flash drive is on the list, proceed to step 2a, otherwise, go to step 3.
2a. Do not do this part unless you don't know your device name. For each device /dev/sda through /dev/sdh, run "fdisk ...", replacing ... with the name of the device you're trying. When you get an output other than "Unable to open ...", press q to exit fdisk. One of the devices that gave you that output is your camera.
3. So you have your device name, such as /dev/sda. Now you need to know what partition on the device you want to use. This is almost always 1 (one, not L), so if your device is /dev/sda, the partition you want to mount is /dev/sda1. To mount it, create a mountpoint (mkdir /usbdrive), then run "mount /dev/sda1 /usbdrive" (replacing /dev/sda1 with your actual device and partition, and replacing /usbdrive with whatever you chose for a mount point).
4. You can now access the files on your USB drive by going into the directory /usbdrive (or whatever directory you used for a mount point). When you are done, to avoid losing data, be sure to umount the drive (umount /usbdrive) before you remove it from the computer.

Please let me know whether or not this works for you, and if it doesn't work, give me the details of what went wrong (including error messages) so I can help you get it working.

Many thanks for your respond i shall try this and get back to you if i have any problems