Gentoo Live

[sonicpenguin]

Why won't Gentoo Live detect my wireless or sound card on my dell laptop? Also, why won't my thumbdrive show up?

[XiaoKJ]

lets see.

what kind of dell laptop?
what version of gentoo live cd?
what wireless card and sound card? (try looking at the output of lspci for details)
usb thumbdrive? was usb-storage loaded from the output of lsmod?

[ladoga]

1. Read this:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-...ns.html#before

2. Run lspci to see what kind of wireless chip and sound chip you have.

3. Run cat /proc/asound/cards to see if alsa has detected your sound chip. Run alsamixer and make sure that master or PCM volumes are not muted.

4. Run lsmod to see what modules are loaded. Paste output to your post so we can take a look at it. Post also the relevant information from lspci. (sound chip and wireless chip)

5. To see how thumbdrive detection progresses run watch -n1 "dmesg | tail -n 20" and plug the drive in. Or just run plain dmesg after plugging the drive in.

If all is fine it will show you something like this:

usb-storage: device found at 8
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic  USB Flash Disk   0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
SCSI device sdb: 512000 512-byte hdwr sectors (262 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdb: 512000 512-byte hdwr sectors (262 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
 sdb: sdb1
sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdb
usb-storage: device scan complete

From above output you can see that there is one partition called sdb1 on drive sdb. We can test mount this filesystem as root with mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt and unmount it with umount /dev/sdb1. To make it writeable for all users I think you need to have an entry for it in /etc/fstab with option "users".

Btw. Does gentoo livecd have /media/usb as default mount point for usb drives? If it's so you might use that as mount point. IIRC /mnt is meant as temporary mount point and should remain empty (as not used in /etc/fstab). Please someone tell me if im wrong.

[sonicpenguin]

Inspiron B130
Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller
Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI Card

SigmaTel Sound

The rest I have no idea what you wrote unless you are telling me to copy/paste those things into the terminal. Sorry.

I figured since this was a newbie site you guys wouldn't mind me being this dumb.

[ladoga]

It's not about being dumb, you just need to put some effort in solving the issues, so that we are able to help.

It helps if you learn to use Google. It will aswer most of the questions you're asking in few seconds and save us lot of time. It will help you to solve problems faster and we won't have to explain readily available basics again and again.

Is lspci a command that should be typed in terminal?
...lets see.

here is first 3 hits from googling for "lscpi":
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/lspci.8.html
http://mj.ucw.cz/pciutils.shtml
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/...p?path=l/lspci

lspci [options]

System administration command. List all Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) devices. This command has many options that are useful for debugging device drivers.

If that didn't coinvince you can always try and type lspci in terminal. Don't be afraid to experiment.

Until you can provide us with more detail there's little we can do. Wireless cards of same model for one example can be based on many different chips. With lspci command you can see (among other things) what is the exact make and model of the chip on your wi-fi card. With that info we can probably tell you which driver (module) it needs.

[sonicpenguin]

Ok, that makes sense. I will copy this thread into a file on my desktop and go through it (I am on my mac right now). I can google the commands on my Mac and work the Terminal on my PC. I will let you know what I find. Thank you for the help, and thank you for being patient with me.