After years on a s l o w laptop with poor 3D acceleration I got myself a T41 and wow it's fast! Finally goodies such as FlightGear are working smoothly! So now I'm getting sick and tired of using the keyboard for navigation (not so much for FG though).

Before heading to the local shop, can anyone recommend certain brands of usb joysticks which are well compatible with Linux, or brands that I should definitely avoid? I searched but couldn't find any info on this (yes, also checked LQ's HCL).

And, as I have no knowledge whatsoever of joysticks, how many buttons would be desirable?

Cheers, Leon.

I can't say much about those new fangled usb joystick thingies, but I have an ancient serial gravis gamepad that works great :o)

Well on the new fangled usb joysticks.

I use a PS2 dualshock with an usb adapter. Which works very well. It shows up as a dual axis, 16 button joypad.
Can't have too many buttons.

How do you get the joystick to work? I have a logitech cordless rumbleopad and I just want to know how to get linux to detect it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Is it an USB joystick right?. Try loading the modules. Open a terminal and type:

su
modprobe joydev

you can test your pad by typing:

cat /dev/input/js0

Now, if you press the buttons on your joystick, you will see a lot of weird characters on the console. That means that it's working ^_^. This can change slightly from one distribution to another. In some distributions you may need to load a few more modules, while on others distributions, you test with "cat /dev/js0" instead.

Now, getting a joypad/stick to work in Linux through the gameport on my Sound Blaster Audigy is like my Ultimate Linux challenge. Could never ever get it to work with Linux, which is sad since I have a nice Sidewinder that I wanted to use with FlightGear and I can't :'(

Good luck!