Joystick module missing?
 

Every time I've read anything about installing a joystick under linux, it says to `modprobe joystick`. Trouble is, I don't even have a joystick driver. I'm assuming that one is supposed to come pre-installed (I'm using Slackware 9.0), but I haven't been able to find one on the disk... has anyone had this problem?

(Okay, it might have been compiled into the kernel, but still, it isn't detecting my normal, MIDI port joystick...)

There is quite a lot of documentation for joysticks in the kernel source (I'm looking at 2.4.21) in the directory Documentation/input. This tells you what to modprobe in various situations.