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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

> We have three USB cards, two ohci (Opti chip) and one uhci (Via chip).
> One Opti works with DOS camera, one does not (this one appears to have
> never been used, in a sealed bag) nor does the VIA.

Today none of these cards worked even in DOS, after which when I changed 
the hard drive it was not recognized, nor were a few others, but a few 
were, but then they were not recognized either, then the computer would 
not boot at all, so I think it is a bad motherboard and nothing to do with 
the USB cards.  We got it from a dumpster and replaced the floppy, serial 
and parallel controllers.  Anyone want an AMD K6/2-300MHz cpu?

I learned that there are three formats of USB.
ohci (USB 1.0 and 1.1) - most brands of chip  - since 1996
uhci (ditto) - VIA and Intel chips only, more software based so cheaper to 
manufacture, more cpu intensive.

ehci (USB 2.0 - since 2000)

We have two cards that are ohci (Opti) and one uchi (VIA).
We have one computer ohci (Compaq) and one uhci (Intel/Gateway) plus the 
nonworking motherboard without USB ports onboard (but there is something 
that looks like a header near the keyboard port).

Slackware 9.1 worked with both the computers, ohci and uhci.

In DOS you can specify whether to expect ohci uhci or ehci, in order to 
speed up the scan. Can you do this in linux while booting with the usb 
scsi kernel using loadlin?

The fact that SW91 dmesg said something about ohci then uhci apparently 
means it looked for the first and then the second, which it found.

We have one laptop where DOS usb did not work and I could not figure out 
whether Redhat USB did, which I suspect has a bad USB port too.  (It also 
has a parport that works with llpro but not plip - maybe they just used 
cheap components).

Sindi