Pardon the long post but I need some help and I think it may be related to the newer kernel, SID and perhaps udev which I haven't worked with before. I just hd installed kanotix 2005-4 (essentially SID) on a spare partition of my main box. First problem I ran into is when I tried to get lmsensors going. Normal practice for me since 2.6 kernels is to just apt-get install lmsensors then run sensors-detect to see what modules I need to insert for temp monitoring. i2c support has been built into 2.6 kernels.

Upon trying sensors-detect got following error:
No i2c device files found. Use prog/mkdev/mkdev.sh to create them

So, I tried a modprobe i2c_dev then reran sensors-detect and it worked. I need asb100 for temp monitoring on my asus (nforce) board. Modprobe asb100 and it works (for that session).

Here comes where I am lost, i2c_dev used to start for init5 at least (it uses alias char major 89) and I would insert the other modules needed in the appropriate etc/modules-whatever-kernel file and run update-modules.

My new install, has very little going on in the modules file, the modules file on my old main installion (2.6.11)is:
ntfs
ac
battery
button
container
fan
processor
thermal
video
pcmcia_core
rsrc_nonstatic
yenta_socket
pcmcia
uhci_hcd
ohci_hcd
ehci_hcd
serial_core
8250
gameport
emu10k1_gp
i2c_nforce2 (I think this called on i2c_dev to load)
agpgart
nvidia_agp
forcedeth
asb100
pcspkr
evdev
af_packet
aes_i586
cryptoloop
autofs4
snd-emu10k1
snd-pcm-oss

But this new install of 2.6.14 has just a "modules" file no kernel identifying in the name and contains:
capability
fuse
pcspkr

I get the feeling something is done differently with this kernel and udev maybe? I hate to mess with hw modules as I think somewhere they can cause harm to hw! Can you clue in somebody that is getting left behind in the debian sid developments? I realize my knowledge is probably pretty basic and lame but thank you for assistance.