Once you've rebooted with your new USB-enabled kernel, you should mount the USB device filesystem to /proc/bus/usb by typing the following command:

# mount -t usbdevfs none /proc/bus/usb

In order to have the USB device filesystem mounted automatically when your system boots, add the following line to /etc/fstab after the /proc mount line:

none            /proc/bus/usb             usbdevfs        defaults   0   0

For more information about USB, visit the USB sites I've listed in "Resources," which follow.