Thanks to a patch from Aurelien Jarno, usbutils now uses the system's libusb to access USB devices, not a private (old) copy of that library. The "usbmodules" program is now deprecated, and no longer built by default. If your Linux 2.4 based system needs it to handle the "coldplug" processing (handling devices that exist before the OS is fully operational), you can "configure --enable-usbmodules".