sidewinder gamepad

[fcornillie]

I'm having problems getting my sidewinder freestyle pro gamepad to work in Gentoo 2.6.14-r4. My analog gamepad works fine. I have tried compiling ns558, joydev, gameport and sidewinder both as modules and straight into the kernel without any favourable result (at some point, the sidewinder gamepad seemed to work, but not all of the buttons worked, and there were also problems with the freestyle function activated or deactivated, I don't really remember all of the details).

By the way, what does the joydump module do? Do I need it?

The sidewinder gamepad works fine in Windows and Knoppix, so the problem seems to be Gentoo-specific, or due to the configuration of my kernel.

My soundcard is a creative labs awe32 (ISA).

This is the output of dmesg:

[fcornillie]

All right, it seems that the sidewinder driver for gameport is pretty definitively broken in the current kernel versions. I emailed two maintainers of the input driver, both of whom didn't respond to the problem. What's more, the bug is listed in bugzilla and very much unresolved. It seems that the maintainers are not worried about maintaining an outdated gamepad on an outdated input (gameport).

So what I did was install different kernel versions. The problem is not Gentoo-specific, as the current vanilla sources (2.6.15) also don't work. The 2.6.11 vanilla sources do work, however, for my sidewinder on a standard gameport (awe 32). That's the same kernel version as on my knoppix 3.8 livecd, with which I tested my joystick successfully (see original message above).

For the rest, I followed the joystick howto on the gentoo wiki and other general information for setting up my joystick.

I see that other users on this forum have the same problem. If you do, revert to kernel 2.6.11 and all should work like a charm.

Cheers.