Controlling XMMS using a gamepad

On windows I used to control winamp using global shortcuts. Since I didn’t immediately find this plugin on linux (although google seems to suggest it exists), I tried the joystick control plugin. But I never used a joystick before on linux.. 🙂

I plugged in my Logitech Dual Action Gamepad and a cpu spike indicated something got detected. 😉 I didn’t have high hopes it would work in XMMS though, since that’s about as archaic as one can get with a gui app. 😉 I enabled the libjoy.so plugin and set the path right to /dev/input/js0 instead of the default /dev/js0. I tried some button and some joystick. It didn’t do anything.

Let’s have a look at Yast. Yes, it has a joystick module, but it didn’t seem to list my gamepad. But then I read in the side column that you don’t have to configure anything if you use an USB gamepad. So next thing was to try KDE’s control center which turns out to also have joystick module. Indeed, the gamepad with all its axes and buttons was properly detected! While I was there, I also did a calibration, mostly for fun, as it didn’t seem necessary. So why didn’t it work with XMMS, because it was just too old?

In a final attempt, I tried testing a “general analog joystick” in yast, which triggered a package install (don’t remember which one). I don’t know if it was the package that did the trick, but after that, it worked in XMMS! It was just a matter of finding out the right buttons by trial and error (the mapping didn’t correspond to KDE’s mapping).

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