Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

James Miller wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Larry A. McFarland wrote:
>
> > Hello to the list, am momentarily off the lurker mode, as I'm
> > frustratingly trying to enable USB on BL 3.40 (big kernel) on an
> > older laptop here! Have been reading this list's archives quite
> > a lot - and noticed that while Steven (3aoo) stated that 3.40
> > works with USB pen drives, I can't get it working. David's USB
> > single floppy works perfectly, as does a partial DragonLinux for
> > USB.
> > I have "insmod'd" ide-scsi, usb-serial, usb-ohci, usb-storage,
> > usb-core, and scsi-mod... I get the following message when I try
> > a "mount": Mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt/sda1 failed: Block device
> > required
> >
> > This message is consistent. Any thoughts from the folks here would
> > be welcomed...
>
> Hello Larry. I haven't yet tried BL3.40 with any USB devices, having only
> booted into it briefly on a couple of machines where no USB functionality
> was required. I do recall others saying they had problems getting USB mass
> storage devices to work--digital cameras, IIRC. It seems that the kernel
> USB modules for this new kernel (2.2.26) are not widely compatible with
> existing hardware. We should perhaps take your post as a further
> indication that USB mass-storage support under BL3.40 is sort of
> hit-or-miss. Anyone else have observations on this?

My pen drive has never worked on any version of Linux older than
2.4. If you compare the 2.2 and 2.4 drivers, you will notice that the
2.4 driver is bigger and much more advanced. So the problem
appears to be that the 2.2 usb-storage driver only works with a
small minority of these devices, and is inferior to the 2.4 driver
if it even works with them at all.

Larry, you will need to use the 2.4 kernels with your device, unless
you can find a way to get 2.2 to work. If you need to use pcmcia
devices at the same time, you will probably want to use the
delilinux kernel (version 2.4.31) or one of the recent slackware
kernels. Or compile your own if you are in the DIY mood.
Remember to install the modules and tools that are specific to your
new kernel. For example, get pppd from here:
http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/2.4.31/userspc.tgz.431
You might (I haven't tried PCMCIA with 2.4.31) also need to upgrade
cardmgr and libc to use cardmgr.

David