Last year, I made a custom USB controller out of a piece of wood and a broken joystick for Frets on Fire, a Guitar Hero type game for Windows and Linux. Since I moved to Ubuntu Linux, I wanted to get the controller working again. Here's what I did:

• 'sudo apt-get install joystick' to install the joystick software

• 'sudo apt-get install joy2key' to install the conversion software

• 'sudo ln -s /dev/input/js0 /dev/js0' to create a soft link to the device driver. I think this may be skipped (see last step).

• Created a '.joy2keyrc' file (see below)

• 'joy2key -dev /dev/js0 -config fretsonfire'. I think maybe '-dev /dev/input/js0' works as well, but it hasn't been consistent for me. Oftentimes, I have to press control-C to exit out of this program when it says 'select a window'...however, it still seems to work fine.

The contents of .joy2keyrc are:

START fretsonfire
-thresh 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
-X
-buttons q w e r t

I then ran Frets on Fire, and configured the 'key' settings for the appropriate frets.

I'm not sure if the instructions above are really perfect, but they worked enough so I could rock a bit!

Update: I've been having problems getting /dev/input/js0 to show up, even if I plug in and unplug the guitar (joystick). It seems if I go up and search for new hardware, none is found. However, this seems to sometimes trigger the driver (or whatever) to be loaded. Maybe there's a better way.