@fanthom
First of all, here are the two files for comparison:
http://pastebin.com/k4t3DEWj
And secondly, my apologies in advance, because I know I am deviating from the standard XFCE distribution you guys have made and I do not intend to waste your time this way. I am learning a great deal this way though. And if you have the time and are willing to look at it just for kicks, so much the better
The first file is standard Porteus 2.0-rc1 unmodified. The second file is my version of a much pruned off Porteus XFCE 2.0-rc1. I've booted
both on the same machine, the one with the PPP dial-up modem for the sake of comparison. Now, my version of XFCE 2.0-rc1 does not have
any sound programs, libraries (except for libasound.so.2 needed by firefox), drivers - all sound drivers are missing from the outcome of
'lsmod | sort > file' However, all the rest of the drivers that you can see in the standard Porteus' 'lsmod' outcome are also in modified XFCE, yet some do not get loaded.
Thank you for explaining to me that the /dev devices are created when drivers are loaded. I was able to load manually (w/ modprobe) all
the modules that did not get loaded at boot up:
'modprobe 8250_core' loaded serial_core as well and the missing /dev/ttyS* devices were promptly produced.
I had to load each single PPP module manually: ppp_generic, ppp_async (which loaded crc_ccitt as well), ppp_deflate (loaded zlib_deflate),
and bsd_comp. At this point I was able to connect to the internet via dial-up, which is how I am writing this post.
Then modprobed thermal_sys' (which loaded hwmon), parport_pc (which loaded parport and ppdev), 8139too (loaded mii), and finally processor and usblp. At this point an 'lsmod' produced the exact list (minus the sound modules) as in standard Porteus on this system.
But what do you make of it? What process is responsible for loading the modules which did not get loaded?
It is probably due to my shrinking the system as I did, from a 211 MB compressed filesystem to a 91 MB compressed filesystem. However,
everything works perfectly now that I have manually loaded the missing modules. Just wondering why the other modules were loaded at
boot up and these ones were not. I'm tempted to just include the modprobe commands for these modules in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and be done with it.
But it would be great to understand what is going on and fix the problem at its root.