confusing USB issue

[Ted Marshall]

In article <4110a4f0803070745g530f9478n4031fc8abb36ea9c at mail.gmail.com>, 
mark.greenbank at gmail.com says...
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Mark Greenbank <mark.greenbank at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a Sierra Wireless card to be used in Linux. The pppd scripts depend
> > on /dev/USB[0-3] being created however they are only created if I boot into
> > VMWare/Windows XP and get it to recognize the card. From then on the
> > /dev/USB[0-3] devices are created and I can use PPP from Linux.
> >
> > Does anyone have an idea of what VMWare is doing to cause the devices to
> > be recognized (and what my Fedora Core 5 is not doing)?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > -mark
> >
> 
> Sorry to reply to my own post -- as I've not received any responses, does
> anyone have an idea about how I could start to debug this?
> 
> Thanks again,
> Mark
> 

This is only a guess and I wouldn't bother except that noone else has 
posted.

It looks like the card requires firmware to be loaded by the driver 
before it is fully functional (this is not that uncommon in a Windows-
centric world).  The Windows driver is probably doing this and the Linux 
driver isn't.

I'm not sure how to solve this but hopefully this will put you on the 
right track.