Howdy,
I installed FC3 on my machine a few months ago. I had no problem using my mouse or printer (once my machine recognized a plugged in printer and gave me a driver select menu), but I'm having serious troubles with everything else.

Its mainly my iPod. I can plug it in through usb, and of course the iPod will say 'Do Not Disconnect', but other than that, nothing happens. I've looked while its plugged in in the hardware browser, and under 'Hard Drives', it lists my main HD under /dev/hda, and then it lists an additional drive under /dev/sda, and for model it has listed 'Apple iPod,' so I think my machine recognizes it but does nothing else.

I installed FC3 from a disc from an issue of Linux User (Issue 45, if it matters). I've always had a few problems going on with it, since mine seems to be a handicapped copy due to the fact that it came from a promo disk, not home burned ISOs. I think the issue may lie in that I haven't run any of the update it tells me to install everytime I boot up. I've tried, but Up2Date just freezes up halfway through the process. I've installed single packages from Up2Date at a time no problem, but when I select more than about 30 at a time it locks up and wont go any further (and there are hundreds of updates it wants to get me).

If it matters, I've tried plugging a Digital Camera in (the only other USB device I have in this house) and nothing happens either.

I've been told that FC3 is supposed to automatically mount an iPod and display it on the desktop...

If someone could please help me out on this, I'd be much obliged. Please keep in mind im definitely a linux newb-I know how to get into the terminal and give commands, all that fun stuff, but if you belch out code at me like a lot of websites I've gone to have done, odds are my head will explode.

Yes, I've tried just mounting it.

mount /dev/sda results in:
mount: can't find /dev/sda in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

I checked, and neither of those (fstab or mtab) is a visible directory. Theres a hidden file in /etc/ with fstab in the title, and its icon is that of an extractable file, but the file ending doesn't fit that, and no file expander I have can expand it.

Thanks very much!

Alright, I'm somewhat of a newb myself so I shouldn't have any trouble staying within your limits. Something you should know up front is that I do not run FC and while I did spend a few months with Red Hat 9 my ability to give you highly specific instructions will be impaired. To make a long story short, these instructions, as with most things in life, will require some practical thought in application.

Okay, here's how I understand USB drives to work. Upon plugging in the USB device the kernel recognizes a device with a device ID connected and at that time cycles through the udev rules to create a dynamic file link to the hardware based off of the ID. This is a broad brush description for your general knowledge since these two events seem to have already taken place (indicated by the presence of /dev/sda)

One easy way to make certain that the /dev/sda is dynamically created is to run dmesg right after plugging the device in. The dmesg out should look SOMETHING like this:

SCSI subsystem initialized
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Vendor: SanDisk Model: Cruzer Mini Rev: 0.2
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
usb-storage: device scan complete
SCSI device sda: 250879 512-byte hdwr sectors (128 MB)
sda: assuming Write Enabled
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 250879 512-byte hdwr sectors (128 MB)
sda: assuming Write Enabled
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0


Obviously your system will vary. They key here is the sda1 letting me know that the first partition on my USB device is /dev/sda1 (/dev/sda referring to the entire device). As long as you don't have any SCSI drives or any other USB Storage devices it's a good guess that /dev/sda1 will be the first partition on your drive but now that you know how to use dmesg to check you want have to guess now will you??

Okay, this bring us to the mount. You're mount failed because you didn't provide enough information and when mount doesn't get all the information it needs it looks for the missing data in /etc/fstab (a file, not a directory). As root you'll need to type "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/floppy". As you've probably guessed already, this will mount the first partition on the USB Storage device onto the /mnt/floppy directory which is where you can go to access files on the device. And there you have it, remember to umount the device prior to removing it and you should be in there like swimwear.