OK, I just bought some generic gamepad for a dollar at a garage sale. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But it only works under Windows! Windows detects and installs it just fine, and Linux detects it, but doesn't know what it is. This is what shows up in the Mandrake Control Panel:

Vendor: Unknown
Bus: USB
Description: USB Gamepad STD.
Module: unknown
Media Class: Human Interface Device|No Subclass|None

So to me it looked like it doesn't know what the module is, which I assumed to be a driver. So, someone said in another post about gamepads to do modprobe hid.o . But that didn't work for me. I did lsmod and HID is there, but it has (unused) next to it. Does anyone know how I can go about fixing this or point me to someplace that can do the same? Thanks.

You the "joydev" module should be loaded as well for the gamepad to work. Look for it in the output of lsmod. It's normal for "(unused)" to appear next to the hid module.

Also check out this website for more detailed information.