Printer doesn't work, blame MODPROBE ?

[payam]

So I've been running Gentoo Linux for a week (have lots of exp with Mandrake and RedHat). I found the other distro's too bloated and slow... ANYWAY...

I've been trying to get my USB printer to work (hp deskjet 940c). I have cups and usb in my USE variable, and I've enabled "Support for USB" and "USB Printer Support" in the kernel as per the instructions of http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/printing-howto.xml

So I compiled these two as modules and I have both usbcore.o and printer.o in (I believe) the correct directories.

When I do modprobe usbcore it says "Can't locate module usbcore" -- I decided to proceed and see how far I can get before I get stuck to maybe give me an idea of exactly what the problem is.

When I do modprobe printer, it gets loaded just fine (and shows up in lsmod).

Anyway, my printer isn't being detected, and isn't showing up in /proc/bus/usb/devices (go figure!)

I'm blaming the fact that usbcore.o couldn't load.

I tried both compiling the modules by making my own Makefile.printer, and after that didn't work, I decided I'd recompile the whole kernel+modules with a make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install

30 minutes later, the same exact problem: usbcore.o doesn't load with a modprobe (or an insmod, if THAT makes a difference)

I do have cups and foomatic emerge'd (though I have a long way to go before I see what kind of problems these two will cook up for me)

Any ideas on what could be wrong? Why can't I load the usbcore.o module?

FYI: Running athlon-xp 2600+ on nforce2 motherboard.

usbcore.o and printer.o are located in /usr/src/linux-2.4.20-gentoo-r5/drivers/usb/