usb mount question

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Tuesday 18 July 2006 9:36 pm, dan moylan wrote:
> at the last two blu linux installfests, when i tried to mount
> my sony digital camera, it mounted fine.  subsequently, when
> i returned home, it didn't.  bizarre.  recently, fiddling
> with yast2 (under suse10) i had no success in mounting the
> camera.  however, looking at the output of the yast2
> hardware probe i saw the following, relating to my camera:
>
>   Driver Status: usb_storage is not active
>
> aha!  modprobe usb_storage then enabled mount to work.
> well, ok, but why couldn't i do something useful under
> yast2 to enable this?  furthermore, on reboot, i had to
> modprobe usb_storage once again.  so, i included the
> modprobe in boot.local and all is now ok, but i guess i
> don't understand why i've had this problem.  i hate
> fumbling in the dark.  any word of wisdom?
There are a number of tools you can use:
1. dmesg gives you a kernel view. Sometimes it is useful to first clear the 
message buffer with 'dmesg -c'.
This is what shows when I press the hotsync button on my PDA:
usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 21
visor 3-2:1.0: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter detected
usb 3-2: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usb 3-2: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1

2. USBView (KDE menu/System/Monifor/usbview)
This is a gui based tool that displays the device characteristics. 

Note that you might want to ask Skip Paul about it tonight after the 
presentation.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9