Joysticks/joypads/etc information needed for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and later

Timo Aaltonen tjaalton at cc.hut.fi
Tue Oct 21 14:51:35 UTC 2008


On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Loïc Martin wrote:

> Timo Aaltonen wrote:
>> On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Loïc Martin wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Stating with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and due to changes in Xorg, each
>>> model of joystick needs a special file to be recognised properly. For
>>> the moment 8.10 doesn't ship with these files, and thus your joystick
>>> shouldn't be working anymore (instead, it should move the mouse cursor,
>>> sometimes preventing the use of the mouse until you unplug the joystick).
>> 
>> No, we don't need that. 
> I'll quote you:
<snip>
> Which means we (the community) still need the lshal information if we want to 
> write specific fdi files for users' joysticks (I hope neither you nor Martin 
> were expecting normal users to hack their fdi file themselves, when most 
> wouldn't be able to do so) so they can just download them and copy them in 
> /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

Ok, we were talking past each other. Still, no need to do that, since 
the evdev-problem only happened on amd64, and there is a oneliner fix 
available now, thanks to Albert Damen:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18150

which will get in the evdev driver after RC. With this patch evdev refuses 
to use joysticks, so that fixes the first half of the problem. 
x-x-i-joystick still needs the HAL fix to be able to use a sensible fdi 
to match input.joystick, but that's only for those that need x-x-i-j which 
should be the minority of the users.

> On the contrary, Martin just wrote:
>> The current model specific .fdi file in xserver-xorg-input-joystick is
>> really just a quick hack, but we shouldn't really go down that route.
>> 
> Can somebody please explain what we expect Intrepid users to do in order to 
> make their joysticks work?

<snip>

you can add the "blacklist" fdi (which leaves x11_driver empty) to 
/e/h/f/policy, and configure the device like before in xorg.conf. The 
driver in intrepid doesn't support properties, but once it does in Jaunty, 
it'll be simple to write gui support for configuring the device through 
properties (or use xinput).


t




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