Merry Christmas to everyone,

I have been hoping to migrate to linux as a primary os for a good while and it is now or never..
Just don't have time for a steep learning curve when I get busy.

I had set my sites possibly too high as a newbie and tried to grapple with Slackware. Initially the os was
asking me for a password which it never asked me to setup during installation.
After a reformat I was getting a lilo problem on reboot. Got a message to edit lilo.conf, as if I understood what or which
line to edit. Was prepared to pay someone help me...got no takers

Then I decided instead of spending the holidays chasing my tail, I ought go for the soft option
which offers paid support for the really stubborn problems.

Funny thing was that I had earlier on decided to avoid Mandriva since I read ( on this site ), this distro slows down dual core machines
and mine is a Pentium III. when I got no help with slackware I decided there is nothing to lose.

I installed the Spring 2007 version of Mandriva and it recognised almost everything and configured samba
played all my multi media files.. Most importantly, it is quite fast and certainly
no sign of slowing down my hardware. Goes to show, not to take all reviews as written in stone.


Now, I really hope someone can help with this..

My USB has and external ide hard drive
A mouse
An external atapi cd burner
SKYPE headset

While the hub seems to be recognised, the devices attached to it are not. Everything works fine in windows.

When by-pass the hub and connect the mouse directly it gets recognised. I did not see any options to mount the hub or
extra usb drives. One thing i did't do was to install os while usb drive already connected. I had been trying to hotswap as u do in windows. But any other ideas would be appreciated.


My machine is;

Dell Latitude
Pentium III 650 MHz coppermine
RAM 512 MB
HDD 60 gigs
Graphics onboard 8 MB


Once again, many thanks

Regards

When you plug your device in the hub, do you get some info from 'dmesg'?

Please take into account I am a newbie and not as yet conversant with linux command or the console. However, if you would be good enough to spell out the process I would be very appreciative and will then let u know the results

Well, you plug the devce in your hub, open opp a terminal and type demsg:

user@darkstar:/home/user$ dmesg
<lots of text>

We will however only need the bottom lines, so you only copy/past the lines that has something to do with the new usb device. So if you past the last 20 lines (Probably enough) we atleast have something to start with. You can get the last 20 lines by typing this insted of the last command: dmesg | tail -n 20
i.e.
user@darkstar:/home/usr$ dmesg | tail -n 20
<20 lines of text here>

On some systems you will have to be root to type dmesg.

Hello, thank you for your patience. Here is the output as requested.



bootsplash 3.1.6-2004/03/31: looking for picture...<6>...found
(1024x768, 22132 bytes, v3).
bootsplash: status on console 2 changed to on
bootsplash 3.1.6-2004/03/31: looking for picture...<6>...found
(1024x768, 22132 bytes, v3).
bootsplash: status on console 3 changed to on
bootsplash 3.1.6-2004/03/31: looking for picture...<6>...found
(1024x768, 22132 bytes, v3).
bootsplash: status on console 4 changed to on
bootsplash 3.1.6-2004/03/31: looking for picture...<6>...found
(1024x768, 22132 bytes, v3).
bootsplash: status on console 5 changed to on
Bluetooth: Core ver 2.8
NET: Registered protocol family 31
Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
Bluetooth: L2CAP ver 2.8
Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.7
ondemand governor failed to load due to too long transition latency
spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.
[root@localhost Desktop]#

What might be a useful pointer to what's going on would be to do this:

1. Open a Konsole Terminal
2. Enter su then put in the root password
3. Type lsusb

This should give a list of everything plugged in to the USB port(s).

It would be interesting to see this with the devices plugged in to the ports directly and via the hub. USB works well with Linux these days, you shouldn't struggle too much with stuff like this.

Did you install KDE, Gnome or XCFE as a windows manager? The latter would be the best bet for your low specified machine...

Hello, I tried your suggestion. The commands did do anything.
I reboot as root, load a console. Then I type Isud and get

bash: Isub: command not found

However, I tried each external usb drive directly by-passing the hub and they were recognized. When I use the hub nothing works.

Whenever I shut down system one of the lines shows proc/load failed..

could that be significant?

I am using GNOME.

Thanks

It's lusub, not lsub. Be very careful about what you type.

You don't have to reboot and log in as root. With the mouse, click on the menu icon in the bottom left: go Menu | Tools | Konsole - it might say Terminal Program (Konsole).

When it opens up the konsole, type: su, then when it asks for your password, put the root password in. Close the konsole down hen you're done.

The fact that it works without the hub points to the hub being broken though. It should just work, there's no reason why it should fail unless there's a hardware set-up issue.

OK, with all devices going through the hub including mouse

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 04cc:1521 Philips Semiconductors USB 2.0 Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

with hub out of picture and mouse connected directly into mbd:

Bus 001 Device 008: ID 046d:c00e Logitech, Inc. M-BJ69 Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Important to keep in mind the hub and all devices are working fine under windows 2000.
Also is the fact that the hub has an AC option which I never had to use with windows. When I use the mains the laser light on my mouse comes on but still does not manage to make the pointer to move on the screen. Whereas when I am not using mains the mouse laser is dead.