USB ports acting strangely in Mint, and other distro's

[hillmort]

I am pretty new to Linux, but I've been installing it on different systems for a month or so, using different distro's, and this is the first problem where I absolutely can not find a single relevant answer in Google.

I recently bought an IBM Thinkcentre and set it up to dual boot Mint and windows xp, it worked great everything works except usb's.

#PROBLEM:
The ports only recognize devices of any kind (controllers, mouse, flash drive, external hd) if they plugged in before booting, or if they are plugged in while the computer is sleeping.

- The usb's are recognized normally in Windows XP
- I tried running different live cd's (Fedora, openSUSE, ubuntu) and they all had the same problem (could this be an issue with the defualt linux 2.6 kernel not working properly with my hardware? if so I dont know what to do next)
- I reinstalled a newer version of Mint... same problem

I really have no idea where to go from here, can anyone help at all?

[reed9]

I don't have a solution for you but I may be able to point you in the right direction.

#PROBLEM:
The ports only recognize devices of any kind (controllers, mouse, flash drive, external hd
) if they plugged in before booting, or if they are plugged in while the computer is sleeping.

First, thing, there is a difference between the device not being recognized by the kernel (bigger problem), and being recognized but the expected action does not occur, ie, a USB drive doesn't mount or show up in your file manager.

Plugging a device in to a running system is called hotplugging. The way most distros currently handle this is basically as follows:

1. the kernel registers the device
2. udev creates a device node in /dev/
3. D-bus tells HAL about it.
4. HAL uses D-bus to alert any programs listening about the device. (Back to the USB flash drive example, the GNOME file manager, Nautilus listens for messages, when HAL send the D-bus message, and creates the desktop icon for the device, or sparks the action to automount the device.)

HAL is being deprecated, and Ubuntu 10.04 will not use it. Some of the functionality in 9.10 has already been moved to devicekit, I believe, though I might be wrong about that.

When you first plug a device in, check dmesg to see if it registers

dmesg | tail

You can also check the output of

lsusb

and see if the device shows up there.

Configuring HAL policies for hotplugging isn't terribly straightforward, unfortunately, but that may be the solution to your problem.

More info from the Arch Wiki. I think it's relatively distro agnostic, but I'm not familiar enough with how Ubuntu or Fedora or whatnot operates to guide you more clearly.
HAL - ArchWiki
Xorg Input Hotplugging - ArchWiki

The fact that many different distros are giving you the same problem is troublesome, though...which might indicate a bug in regards to your particular hardware.

[hillmort]

thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge reed9.
here is a little bit more info:

this is the tail end of dmesg, two things i noticed were
1.the last line, I disconnected a usb and that showed up in dmesg, but when i plugged it back in nothing.
2. [ 13.158364] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track
I don't think this is relevant
sr0 is my DVD/cd dirve, it is working fine.... so i think this just means the cd in there is damaged in some way

: 
[   13.158364] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track
[   13.158370] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 62504
[   13.159278] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[   13.159283] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[   13.159287] ILI
[   13.159289] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Illegal mode for this track
[   13.159295] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 62504
[   17.678934] usb 1-1: usbfs: interface 1 claimed by usblp while 'usb' sets config #1
[   27.338184] tg3: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
[   27.338189] tg3: eth0: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX.
[   27.338329] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[   37.416014] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
[   49.486145] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[   49.579974] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[   52.417668] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[   52.417674] UDF-fs: No partition found (1)
[  875.721096] usb 1-7: USB disconnect, address 5

lsusb doesn't show anything of interest, it just lists the devices that were plugged on boot and says nothing is in the other ports.

does this narrow things down at all?

[hillmort]

after spending a few hours looking around the file systems and the internet, and trying to apply some of the solutions noted in the links on hal (none of which really proved to be to useful except that I learned a bunch of stuff )that you suggested....

I decided to try one last thing before I gave up, I plugged in an old cicero 4 port usb hub I had lying around and rebooted the computer....

for some reason hotplugging works fine off this device... interesting eh?
this is a pretty decent work around as nothing else is wrong with my system but I'm still pretty curious as to what the actual problem is.