Mini-distro odyssey: Network card driver won't autoloaded

[ITWombat]

I have an old PC which I have has an ISA NE2000 NIC to save on PCI slots. I have generally found that most Linux distros will recognise most network cards and go through DHCP at boot time. Not this time. I tried Xubuntu and Puppy Linux and both didn't load and start the relevant [driver] module. I had to manually modprobe and then dhcpcd.

In the end I was reduced to putting the above commands in rc.local

Is there no other way of forcing linux to load particular drivers? modprobe.conf appears to say how modules should be processed but not which modules should be processed

[Geoff]

list the module in the confusingly named '/etc/modules' file (at least on Debian derivatives).