Sometimes when you plugin that crazy new usb, firewire, etc. device into you computer, you're not quite sure whether the device is supported, if it's working or maybe the OS doesn't even know it's there if you don't get any visual feedback. Well, we are going to outline a few steps that you can take to always guarantee that you'll get some feedback as to what's going on with your device (whether it is good news or bad).

Basically, the principle is that the kernel, and possibly some daemons, will be watching for any new devices being added to the machine, and if the device is plugged in properly and it is a working device, the kernel will absolutely give you some kind of feedback on how it sees this new device. If it sees it properly, and it has a driver that suits the device, it will usually autoload the driver and create the appropriate device node in the filesystem so that your new device is accessible right away (this kind of depends on your distro and setup, but as a general rule it's true). Now just because all of that happend automagically, doesn't mean that you have any idea how to access the device, so that's what we want to find out.

We first want to grab a copy of the kernel log file in it's current (pre device plugin) state and a list of the modules that the kernel has loaded. We do that by issuing the following commands 

sudo cp /var/log/messages messages.before
sudo lsmod > lsmod.before