USBView is a GTK program that displays the topography of the devices that are plugged into the USB bus on a Linux machine. It also displays information on each of the devices. This can be useful to determine if a device is working properly or not. For this program to be useful, you will need to mount the debug filesystem (debugfs). Add this line to your /etc/fstab: debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0 Now a simple `mount debugfs` will make the USB info available to USBView. The debugfs root directory is accessible only to the root user by default. You can grant access to the USB device info (as well as the rest of the debugfs tree) with the "uid", "gid", and "mode" mount options. For example: debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto,mode=755 0 0