Okay, so here's what I'm stuck using Windows for:

USB devices -
- Digital Camera
- Transcend USB TV-Box TV tuner
- Rio Chiba mp3 player
- Ripping CDs to mp3
- DVD playback and ripping

DIGITAL CAMERA
My digital camera should be too hard. In Windows it's recognized as a USB Mass Storage Device, and doesn't require that I install any drivers. I'm just not sure how USB works in linux.

TRANSCEND USB TV-BOX TV TUNER
In windows it loads the USB 2800 Video drivers, and the audio is the line-in on my soundcard.

RIO CHIBA MP3 PLAYER
I have no clue for this one. In Windows I'm stuck using the software that Rio provides, so I'm not seeing a whole lot of flexibility.

RIPPING CDs TO MP3
I've got XMMS working fine with my current collection, but of course a guy's always gotta have more. Ideally, I'd like to use command line tools, then I can write a script for it. I've got cdparanoia on my computer and have been trying figure it out. I suppose the next step would be bladeenc, but I'm not there yet.

DVD PLAYBACK AND RIPPING
I had DVDs playing fine in xine, but then I had to re-install and it doesn't work now. Although, xine does play mpegs just fine. Any other options? I've never done any dvd ripping, but the ideal would be something that was just a simple command line program.

MISC INFO
Distro - Whitebox Linux
Do you need to know other hardware?

OK, the ones I know:

If the camera is just detected as USB mass storage, then most likely you'll plug it in, Linux will detect in and all you'll have to do is mount it somewhere on the system and then transfer images from it as if it were any other drive. It took me a couple guesses to find out that my MP3 player (also detected as mass storage) was just a FAT file system. Which brings me on to:

The Rio Chiba...is that a portable MP3 player that you plug into the USB port to transfer songs to and from it? If so then you can probably use that in much the same way as the camera. Possibly it uses a different file system.

There are loads of CD > MP3 rippers. I use CDParanoia, though another I know of is grip.

I've never ripped DVD's but I play mine back using MPlayer.

CD Paranoia only rips to wave though doesn't it? I'm fine with that, so long as I can get something that will encode to mp3.

Yes a Rio Chiba is a portable mp3 player, but when I plug it in, it is not detected as USB mass storage. I've gotta use the software that came with the mp3 player to transfer songs.

Yeah, good point - I used it last week but that was to make an audio CD so wav is exactly what I wanted. You can use lame to convert to mp3. I think sox might also do it.

Just reading a review of the Chiba, it looks like there is no linux support...so you're stuck there unless you can get wine to run the software.

ripperx works good you can get the rpm here; http://at.rpmfind.net/opsys/linux/RPM/RByName.html

Well here's a problem. Apparently USB isn't working in linux. Any thoughts/directions/links to information on how I can fix that?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rioutil/ -> i think it works..
did you tried..
fdisk -l
(after turning on your USB camera)