grammjr wrote:

Mounting USB wireless adapter and hard drive
I have a Linksys wireless G USB adapter. When I plug it in nothing happens, how do I install this hardware.

I also have a Vantec external USB hard-drive and when I turn it on it says it cannot mount the drive. How do I get this mount this drive. It is formatted NTFS, my windows back up drive.

I am very new to Linux and cannot find this information i the helps. Please keep it simple.. I can do command line :(

Welcome to the world of Linux Jim. Don't be afraid, every thing seems awkward when you start on this world and you come from the Windows world ;)

First of all, it would help us a lot if you could tell us which linux distribution you are running.

I will assume you are using ubuntu...

For your wirless adapter... this is probably gonna be a bit difficult. First of all, make sure the device is detected by the kernel:

sudo lsusb

And check for your device. You can also have a look at:

sudo cat /var/log/messages

And check if the adapter is recognized or if it tells you any usefull information.

If you are running a linux distribution using Networkmanager to manage your network(like ubuntu does), it should work out of the box unless there are any problems. You should be able to see wireless networks clicking on the networkmanager applet.

Now, let's go for your external hard drive.

Maybe there is a problem about permissions for mounting external devices. A good way to see if this is the real problem, is to check if you can mount the hard drive as root. For this we will do:

sudo cat /var/log/messages

And check for the output about yourr external hard drive. As an example, here you have the part you would need on my system.

Mar 23 21:35:53 Telperion kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

Mar 23 21:35:53 Telperion kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Mar 23 21:36:32 Telperion kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 7744512 512-byte logical blocks: (3.96 GB/3.69 GiB)

Mar 23 21:36:32 Telperion kernel: sdb: sdb1

It says the device is known as "sdb" and it has one partition known as "sdb1".

We would then mount it by:

sudo mkdir -p /media/usb_disk

To create the folder where we will mount the device.

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb_disk

To actually mount the device.

If this works, come again a will try to find a way to mount the hard drive as a regular user. It probably is just a matter of editing a line in /etc/fstab so don't worry ;)

Good luck and I hope to hear good news from you soon!

grammjr wrote:

I have a Linksys wireless G USB adapter. When I plug it in nothing happens, how do I install this hardware.

We first need to determine what driver you need for that adapter. Could you please open a terminal (it should be somewhere in the menu, if you use Ubuntu in Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and enter the following in the command line:

lsusb

If you copy the output of that command and post it here, it should help us figure out how to configure your wireless adapter.

I also have a Vantec external USB hard-drive and when I turn it on it says it cannot mount the drive. How do I get this mount this drive. It is formatted NTFS, my windows back up drive.

Try installing a package called ntfs-3g, restart your computer and try again. If you need help installing this package, please post what Linux distribution you are using ;)

If the last suggestion didn't help, it could you please post some more information about your system? Two useful pieces of information would be what distribution you are using, and the literal error you get when you try to mount the harddrive.

Seems like Marc got here first with some great advice :)

Congratulations on getting the wireless to work, that isn't always a trivial task.

The external harddrive should mount just fine, but it might require a little bit of configuration first. Could you please post (1) what distribution you are using, and (2) the exact error message you get when you try to mount it? That should help us help you ;)