printk doesn't work

I'm an absolute newbie using Ubuntu 7.1
Reading through Oreilly's Device Driver book and trying to get hello world device driver to print a message.

When I "insmod hello.ko" the "printk" does not display anything on the console, but is logged to /var/log/messages.

cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk yields "4 4 1 7"

I've even tried setterm -msglevel 8

Please help on getting "printk" to actually print to the terminal.. thanks.