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Ubuntu 8.10 Joystick Breakage

Nov 01, 2008 LostCause link
When upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, your joystick becomes a mouse. One of the simplist workarounds that I found was to drop a file called joystick.fdi into /etc/hal/fdi/policy to tell X not to use the joystick as an input device. It will still work in VO, however.

An example joystick.fdi:

-------------CUT HERE----------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="YOUR JOYSTICK NAME HERE">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string"></merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
-------------CUT HERE----------------------

Replace "YOU JOYSTICK HERE" with the name of your joystick as found by doing something like:

lshal | grep info.product

and searching through the (probably long) list for your joystick.

Edit: This _may_ only be for amd64.
Nov 03, 2008 roguelazer link
Note: This would happen in any distribution using X input device hotplugging. Which I imagine will be all of them as the updates trickle in.
Nov 13, 2008 Person link
Thanks LostCause!
Nov 25, 2008 firsm link
this has been fixed in ubuntu proposed already and should be in the main repo now.