[NTLUG:Discuss] Where do USB devices appear these days?

[steve]

Kevin Brannen wrote:

> If you do a "lsmod | grep usb", you should see 2 "*hci*" type modules 
> referenced,  As I understand it, there's a uhci_hcd which is USB1, and 
> an ehci_hcd which is USB2.  For a reasonably modern camera, I would 
> think you'd be OK as it's probably using USB2.

Hmm - I get:

 > lsmod | grep usb
usb_storage            63680  1
usbserial              28008  0
usbhid                 41312  0
usbcore               108760  7 usb_storage,usbserial,iforce,
                                 usbhid,ehci_hcd,ohci_hcd
ide_core              120020  4 usb_storage,ide_cd,ide_disk,amd74xx
scsi_mod              125256  6 usb_storage,sg,st,sr_mod,libata,sd_mod

...so I see "ehci_hcd" and "ohci_hcd" - but no mention of 'uhci_hcd'

> But my PDA is just old enough, and apparently low budget enough, :-) 
> that it's a USB1 device.  And while these 2 interfaces should peacefully 
> co-exist, for me they conflict.  The only way I can make the PDA 
> reliably recognized and accessable, is to put "rmmod ehci_hcd" in my 
> /etc/init.d/boot.local (this is with Suse 9.2).

Removing that module causes:

1) KDE to pop open the accursed Konqueror window with the "camera:/"
    fake URL in the location box.

2) A new popup that says that SUSEPlugger crashed with a SIGSEGV, the
    backtrace isn't much help - it says that it crashed inside 'strcspn'
    in the standard C library - which could be anything.

'SuSEPlugger' sounds like something SuSE thought up all by
themselves...and it sucks.

>  Admittedly, I'm also 
> dealing with VMware to run the PDA software, but I had no (none, nada, 
> zero, zilch, ...) trouble with this under 9.1.  I don't understand why 
> we're taking a step backwards, but it is frustrating.

Yep - indeed.

> HTH in some way,

Well, it suggests a direction to look in - but I'm not much further
forwards.

What I found today was that /dev/disk/by-label/  ...is a directory
that contains the names of all of the USB mass storage devices
I've ever plugged into this machine.   Each entry is a symbolic
link to something like /dev/sda1 - which is a 'fake' SCSI device.

I can manually mount that as if it was a conventional hard drive:

    mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/whatever

...and then I can see my camera.  However, odd things are still
happening with some USB devices - so it's not *that* simple.