After a recent package update, I lost all USB related devices in my 2.6 kernel install (still worked fine when booting into kernel 2.4). As per suggestion here, it was an issue of not loading the USB modules (notably, the usbhid for the mouse and usbnet for the ethernet).

All well and good; both the mouse and ethernet (and everything else that I can see) works fine. However, I don't want to do this song and dance everytime I boot up (not ot mention my wife doesn't like doing anything via command line before hte mouse is active).

I know from other installs (Debian and Suse) that I have on other machines how to edit the initrd so these modules load everytime. However, Mepis will not let me write to the initrd (when mounted as a loop on the hd).

Any suggestions as to how one can insert the modprobe command for these two modules into the initrd script so I don't have to do this every time?

Thanks

just throw it in the file /etc/modules

edi: just the module name, not the modprobe command.