device manager equivalent

[electronicjason]

Is there an equivalent in Knoppix to the Windows "device manager".

And is there anything that will show me the USB devices connected to the computer also?

Jason

[garyng]

Is there an equivalent in Knoppix to the Windows "device manager".

And is there anything that will show me the USB devices connected to the computer also?

Jason

To just have a look at what is available in the system, there is the KDE Info Center. But it is in no way as comprehensive as Windows like installing new driver, rollback driver etc.

[rickenbacherus]

To just have a look at what is available in the system, there is the KDE Info Center. But it is in no way as comprehensive as Windows like installing new driver, rollback driver etc.

Comprehensive? I certainly wouldn't have used that word- I think cute and fuzzy but mostly useless is a better descriptor of the hardware manager.

Anyway...to the actual question. There are all sorts of different ways to see info about hardware- each Linux desktop environment has its own. But they all (more or less) are just frontends for an actual command. But rather than compare apples to oranges I will actually answer your question.

The following will work on ANY Linux system- irregardless of the particular distro and desktop environment you are using.

lspci -v
cat /proc/pci
cat /proc/interrupts
cat /proc/bus/usb/devicecs
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
cat /proc/cpuinfo
procinfo -f
free
X -version
df -haT

Specifically- for USB there is an app called 'usbview'. Just enter usbview in a terminal.

[richeddy]

After installing Knoppix via KNX-HDINSTALL, when I run usbview in a terminal window, I get an error message that pops up in a window:

Can not open the file /proc/bus/usb/devices

Verify that you have USB compiled into your kernal, have the USB core modules loaded, and have the usbdevfs filesystem mounted.

This is the same on three systems. When I run Knoppix from the CD, all is fine. everything is detected, etc.

Any ideas?

[rickenbacherus]

After installing Knoppix via KNX-HDINSTALL, when I run usbview in a terminal window, I get an error message that pops up in a window:

Can not open the file /proc/bus/usb/devices

Verify that you have USB compiled into your kernal, have the USB core modules loaded, and have the usbdevfs filesystem mounted.

This is the same on three systems. When I run Knoppix from the CD, all is fine. everything is detected, etc.

Any ideas?

Sure- it can't mount it because it can't find it in fstab methinks.
Just add this to your /etc/fstab:

none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0

That oughtta do it.

[richeddy]

After installing Knoppix via KNX-HDINSTALL, when I run usbview in a terminal window, I get an error message that pops up in a window:

Can not open the file /proc/bus/usb/devices

Verify that you have USB compiled into your kernal, have the USB core modules loaded, and have the usbdevfs filesystem mounted.

This is the same on three systems. When I run Knoppix from the CD, all is fine. everything is detected, etc.

Any ideas?

Sure- it can't mount it because it can't find it in fstab methinks.
Just add this to your /etc/fstab:

none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0

That oughtta do it.

Ah, methinks you are on to something. I added that line to my fstab file and now I can manually mount it, but only as root. Further, if I mount it as root I cannot read or write it as user. How do I change this? Oh, and thanks for the help!

[garyng]

To just have a look at what is available in the system, there is the KDE Info Center. But it is in no way as comprehensive as Windows like installing new driver, rollback driver etc.

Comprehensive? I certainly wouldn't have used that word- I think cute and fuzzy but mostly useless is a better descriptor of the hardware manager.

Well what word to describe it doesn't matter, the fact is, it is much better in terms of knowing what hardware are detected by the system and what drivers have been loaded, comparing to what is in linux. What would be the equivalent in linux ? none I can think of.

As for useless, I tend to agree but not because it lacks functionality but more towards that one usually don't need it as the hardware detection/driver loading mechanism of XP is so good that one seldom needs to play around with the device manager.

For a linux expert, one can always beat the device manager(the flexibility is just uncomparable) but for joe user, linux has a long long way to go. Isn't it true that one of the most praised 'advantage' of KNOPPIX is its hardware detection ? That tells you what is the weakness of linux.