Why doesn't Ubuntu 9.10 detect my USB devices?
 

"Computer" nor "Palimpest Disk Utility" showed anything about the attached devices. However, the command:
outputs:
Do you think upgrading will fix this? What else might I do?

what does dmesg display?

sorry, plug usb device in and then
dmesg
or
dmesg > dump.msg and tail dump.msg

The usb devices were plugged in.

I'm not sure what is

the idea is to see what the kernel logs as the usb device is plugged in. therefore do the dmesg shortly after plugging the usb device in.

the dmesg > dump.msg writes the contents to a file "dump.msg". the tail dump.msg shows the last part of the file and hopefully the usb event. do a rm -i dump.msg when done.

This does nothing. Did I get the command right?

However:gave me this outptut anyways:

What this shows is that your kernel did detect the usb device. If the kernel has a suitable driver and what it does with it is another story.

The dmesg > dump.msg redirects the standard terminal to the file "dump.msg". That is why you saw nothing on the screen. The tail dump.msg shows the last part of the dump.msg file, and the kernel response to you plugging in the usb device.

You can always "man <keyword>" to understand what a command does.

You may want to a) ls -la /sys/dev/block and b) ls -la /sys/dev/char to see if your usb device is a block or character device.

output:
output:

so you can see the changes in one of the above files with the usb device in and out.

to see if the kernel mounts the device do the following:

with usb device out and in your user directory: cat /proc/self/mountstats > file1.dmp
with the usb device in and in your user directory: cat /proc/self/mountstats > file2.dmp
see how the device was mounted: diff file1.dmp file2.dmp

remove the temp files: rm -i file?.dmp

if there was no difference(diff command) then the device was not mounted by the kernel
you can mount it with mknod and mount

Pardon my misunderstanding, but the command cat /proc/self/mountstats > file1.dmp is supposed to write to a file called file1.dmp.

1. Where is this file?
2. What is its purpose?
3. Would I remove it with the command rm -i file1.dmp?
4. How where you suggesting that I use the diffcommand?
5. What did you mean mknod AND mount?

My keyboard & mouse are usb and here is the output of cat /proc/self/mountstats which is the same with the devices plugged in and not:

I used http://www.quickdiff.com/ to tell the diffference, but for my reference please answer the above 5 questions anyway.

As I was researching what mknod is, I read this from The Linux System Administrator's Guide: I think mknod and mount are executed as: mknod mount

1)The files, file1.dmp and file2.dmp, would be in your current directory that you issued the cat /proc/self/mountstats > file1.dmp from. That is why i suggested your home directory i.e. cd ~.

2)From the dmesg earlier, it became apparent that the kernel was aware of the usb device being plugged in. We want to know if it was mounted in the file system. Therefore we store what was mounted, in file1.dmp, before the usb device was plugged in, and file2.dmp, after the usb device was plugged in.

3)Yes the rm -i would remove them and you would run the rm -i command after the diff command. We just want to see if the usb device was mounted.

4)Use the diff command as suggested in your home directory i.e. diff file1.dmp file2.dmp
The differences between the two files would then be printed on the console. A simple way to detect a change in the mounting status on your filesystem.

5)If the kernel did not mount the usb device you could mount it manually by using the mknod and mount command. You need to know if it is a character or block device and it requires major and minor numbers. How the major and minor numbers are assigned has changed in the kernel in the past few years. You can choose "experimental" major and minor numbers but you should not be going there. If your kernel did not mount the device I suggest you google for a suitable device driver for that particular usb device.

FYI: Ubuntu 9.10 will reach end of life in April of this year.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-ver...e-details.html
You will need to upgrade to (or preferably do a clean install of) Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 by then.

I didn't understand this:
What would the terminal command look like for mknod and mount?