Tuxracer used to work on my computer, but I decided I wanted joystick support, and that was a big mistake

(disclaimer: I have experience with systems programming on Solaris and kernel hacking on Linux, so I've already tried the things you'd tell a newbie)

First, I installed SDL 1.2. Then, I realized that HardDrake didn't recognize my Gravis GamePad Pro USB. Is there any quick way to make it do so? I can't find info on that in HowTos.

After that, I decided to move on anyway. I ran the tuxracer configure script, and it blew up when searching for libGLU. I checked config.log, and it was missing a large number of functions. Remember, TuxRacer worked fine before I started messing with it. After I attempted to recompile it, whenever I tried to run the old copy, my entire system would hang before the window appeared and i would have to reboot using alt-sysreq-b. I reinstalled it from the Mandrake CD (it comes there as an RPM) and it worked.

I had Mesa 3.1 installed as an RPM (which I'm assuming came with mandrake 8, because I didn't install it). I uninstalled it, then I downloaded Mesa 3.4 source and compiled it. It gave a bunch of errors about variables being used uninitialized in triglyph.h, but it compiled and installed. TuxRacer still wouldn't compile and it stopped running again.

I have since tried Mesa 4.0 also. Same results as 3.4. Any ideas why this might be happening? Does TuxRacer's config script do weird things to find libraries? Is there a problem with Mesa? (The TuxRacer faq recommended it). Why did it work before and then stop before I had actually touched the GL libraries? The only other time I touched libGL* was when I installed the drivers for my NVIDIA TNT2, and TuxRacer worked fine that way. And why doesn't it see my gamepad?

Thanks all....