Still more USB woes on freebsd-10.1-i386

[Manish Jain]

> Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2015 21:14:08 +0530
> From: bourne.identity at hotmail.com
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: USB woes on freebsd-10.1-i386
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I installed FreeBSD-10.1-i386 with GNOME on my AMD Athlon computer (3.4 
> GHz, 1.75 GB RAM) a couple of months ago. While I am generally happy 
> with my OS (to the extent that I hardly ever need to boot into Windows 
> XP SP3), there are a couple of USB-related problems that won't go away 
> on my system and that I can't fix by myself.
> 
> 1) My Canon PIXMA MG2470 printer does not print. Although a) all 
> necessary ports are installed,  b) print/cups-base has been built with 
> libusb, and c) the printer is recognized immediately by the system the 
> moment it is switched on, the list of local printers in CUPS 
> browser-based configuration is empty. Further, the printer - when 
> switched on - shows up at an indeterminate location /dev/usb/2.X.0 (X 
> could be 3 or 5 or 6), despite explicitly being hooked to /dev/usb/2.6.0 
> in /etc/devfs.rules
> 
> 2) The APC UPS attached to my system is not able to shut down my system 
> in case of a power failure, although apcupsd.conf is configured to 
> initiate a system shutdown when battery level falls below 5 minutes 
> remaining. Running self-test with acptest succeeds with result PASSED, 
> but battery calibration  with apctest fails with the message "Failed to 
> read current battery level" despite battery level being 100% and load 
> being in the region of 20% (percentage figures as reported by APC 
> Powerchute v3.0.2 on Windows XP SP3).
> 
> Both printer and UPS work seamlessly under Windows XP SP3.
> 
> I am attaching to this message a zip archive containing :
> 
> output of 'uname -a'
> list of ports installed
> latest log of dmesg
> copy of /etc/rc.conf
> 
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Manish Jain
> +91-98995-82709

It gets worse. Now my standard 101-key Logitech keyboard freezes (without recovering) while using GNOME. So now I have 3 devices which don't work :

1) UPS which can run a self-test but is unable to shut down the computer upon power failure
2) printer which does not get detected
3) keyboard which freezes after a while

Although each problem can be attributed to a separate port, the common thread is USB. All 3 devices work perfectly under Windows XP SP3. The external USB hub I use can be ruled out because the printer and keyboard are connected directly to motherboard ports.

Unless there is a trouble-shooting manual, all I can do is wait for the next FreeBSD release - and let Microsoft win the argument for the meanwhile.

Regards,
Manish Jain