Microknoppix and USB Drivers on PowerPC - How To?

[micropaws]

Hi! I'm working on a system which has an embedded PowerPC and Microknoppix (kernel version 2.6.19).

I need to get it to work with a USB device which has some kind of USB-Serial converter chip in it. The manufacturer's website gives the following instructions for Linux:

To load the generic USBSerial driver, enter the following string:
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x213e product=0x000a

However, I get the following error:

FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.19/modules.dep: No such file or directory

Here is the listing of /lib/modules:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12415 Sep 7 2007 ccduevent.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 ccdu 23410 Nov 14 2008 i2c-core.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 ccdu 10107 Nov 14 2008 i2c-dev.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 ccdu 7932 Nov 14 2008 i2c-mpc.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107572 Jun 29 2007 jffs2.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6290 Jun 4 2007 wdog83xx.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20852 Jun 29 2007 zlib_deflate.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16092 Jun 29 2007 zlib_inflate.ko

So I guess that modules.dep should tell modprobe what it needs and where to find it, and that it has been left out of this Microknoppix version to save space. Am I on the right track?

Should I be able to download and install a modules.dep? Is it platform-dependent?

Or, should I be going about this another way?

The USB device should create a virtual com port, which (in theory) I can open from my C program like a normal serial port. If that works I will be very happy as i can get back to writing code (the real work!).

All I know about the USB part of the device is that it is "vendor=0x213e product=0x000a". However, I can't find any info on this vendor or product with Google.

Any suggestions, including suggestions of any other forums where this question might be more appropriate, would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

[klaus2008]

Should I be able to download and install a modules.dep? Is it platform-dependent?

Look at http://linux.die.net/man/8/depmod and try

sudo depmod -a 2.6.19

[micropaws]

Thanks! I had to create /lib/modules/2.6.19/ but then it worked. However, now when I run modprobe I get the error:

FATAL: Module usbserial not found.

I guess I have to face the fact that this kernel doesn't have USB-Serial support built in. I've been trying to compile a module as I have some source code for a driver for the specific device, but cross-platform kernel module compilation is a bit beyond me...