Hello all.

My joystick input hardware used to work fine with all SuSE versions.
The KDE tool calibrated, and all was well.

Then I installed Mepis (because of the package manager). Its great - except that the joystick is just not there as a device. It may be a feature of Debian/Ubuntu - based distros because the Knoppix LiveCD system also cannot find the joystick.

Needed for the open-source realistic simulator FlightGear, where time-integrated keypresses cannot replace proportional analogue (joystick) inputs. My searches and questions on the Mepis forum have not yet come up with anything.

The PC motherboard is a ASUS A7N8X2.0 which used Nvidia nForce2 chipset and a AMD Athlon XP2500+ (Barton).
It has onboard sound (AC97) and a onboard joystick connector.
The kernel is 2.6.15.26-k7 (for Athlons)

I have installed libjsw2, "joystick" which provides jscal and jstest, jscalibrator, input-attach, and xserver-xorg-input-joystick which seems to live in /lib/modules, but I don't know if any are useful here.
This may involve "installing module" and "kernel configure" and "edit something.conf" and go other places I should not, but I badly need a few pointers on how this can be done. I am aware of another posting in this forum about installing hardware, but I would appreciate any help on getting the joystick working.