I'm posting this in case anyone has the same problems I had hooking up a USB joystick in GNU/Linux. Although there are plenty of articles on how to load the USB modules necessary to support USB devices, there was something missing for me in the steps outlined so I'm gonna share what I had to do. It's pretty simple, since I had the USB HID modules already compiled into the kernel it would recognize my joystick. I could see it recognized using dmesg. But when I tried to cat /dev/input/js0 it would give me a "no device found" error. So I then installed the joystick package using apt-get. This setup my joystick and it was working fine.. until I rebooted. It turns out that you need to load joydev module using modprobe joydev. Make sure this module loads on boot and you'll be fine. Use the jtest util (provided with the joystick package in Debian) to test your device, or just cat the device as I specified above.

And why do I need a joystick? To fly my virtual r/c airplanes of course (x-plane):