USB devices are accessed via special files under /dev. We'll be using the following special files for our three USB devices:
Device
Special File
mouse
/dev/input/mouse0 or /dev/input/mice
Zip drive
/dev/sda4
printer
/dev/usblp0
Let's begin with the USB mouse. In general, using a USB mouse in the system console does not require configuration. However, using it under X does. We'll look at the configuration for X version 4 here, which involves editing the XFree86Config file (usually found in the /etc/X11 directory).
First, we must add an InputDevice section to the file. Here is an example:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "USB Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
EndSection
The special file mentioned in this example, /dev/input/mice, refers to any and all USB mice present on the system. If you wanted to specify just the first USB mouse, you would use /dev/input/mouse0 instead.
Secondly, we must tell the X server about the mouse device via an InputDevice directive in the ServerLayout section. For example, these entries specify both a normal mouse and a USB mouse:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Layout[all]"
InputDevice "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "USB Mouse" "SendCoreEvents"
...
EndSection
The first field in the InputDevice directive is the Identifier from the corresponding InputDevice section defined previously. The second field is a keyword that specifies how to treat that mouse device. If you want to use only a USB mouse, remove the entry for the usual mouse, and set the second parameter of the USB mouse's entry to CorePointer.
That's all there is to it. The next time you start X, the mouse should be working.
Next, we'll move on to the USB printer. In general, configuring a USB printer is no different than setting up any other printer under Linux: attach the device, set up /etc/printcap entries, and so on. Once the USB device is recognized, no other special handling is necessary.
Using the provided administrative tools is often a quick and convenient method of adding a new printer. Alternatively, you can set up a printer manually, using the same device file, /dev/usblp0. Once the corresponding printer queue is configured, printing to the new device is ready to go.
As our final example, we'll add an external USB Zip 250 drive to the system. Zip drive support is provided by the USB mass storage driver. Via a sleight of hand, this driver tricks the standard SCSI driver into servicing the USB disk. Accordingly, the kernel must also provide SCSI support to use such USB devices, specifically: SCSI support, SCSI generic support and SCSI disk support. For the same reasons, SCSI disk special files are used to refer to Zip drives.
Once the device is recognized by the USB subsystem, you can mount it in the normal way. For example, the following command could be used to mount a Zip disk at /zip250:
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /zip250
Note that the Zip disk's DOS partition is interpreted as partition 4 on the disk. You can also build other file system types on Zip disks if you like. One final, important point: be sure to unmount the /zip file system before ejecting the disk or you may lose data in unflushed disk buffers.
Many people have been slow to use USB devices on Linux systems. Hopefully, this column has shown you just how easy it really is.
however there is this website to check ..its good enough.....
www.linux-usb.org