Hello opensesame and welcome to LQ,
the first step is to find out if your USB-device is recognized by the kernel/OS. Please open a terminal and post the output of
or
respectively.
Also you may post the output of
(directly after putting the USB-device in)
The following step is to find out if the appropriate modules are loaded (in the windows-world we would speak about the "driver"). The command is "lsmod" on the commandline. So please post the output of
.
Markus