usb ports not recognized, "lsusb" fails

[dragonpaint37]

AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ dual-cure 2.2 GHz
1GB DDR2 667MHz ram
Sapphire ATI Radeon x1950 pro 512 MB

I just installed ubuntu 8.10
I had a black screen but it was fixed by adding "noapic acpi=off irqpoll" at the end of the boot line before the installation.
When i plug in any usb, such as, ipod, camera, or flash drive, the icon of it does not appear on my desktop, the device is not powered, and when i type in "lsusb" in the terminal there is no output.

Can someone please help?

[nixscripter]

The first place to look would be in the system bootup logs. Open a terminal and type: dmesg | grep -i usb

See if the device appears in there. If you're not sure, you can post it here (make sure to put [code] forum tags around it).

[dragonpaint37]

ol@ola:~$ dmesg | grep -i usb
[ 1.938265] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
[ 1.938289] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[ 1.938328] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[ 1.947257] ohci_hcd: 2006 August 04 USB 1.1 'Open' Host Controller (OHCI) Driver
ol@ola-dragon:~$

[nixscripter]

Okay, so it can see the controller.

Now, run this command: sudo tail -0lf /var/log/messaegs

type your password, and plug in your drive. You should get a message or two about usb devices.

When you're done, hit Control-C to break out of it.