Saitek X56 de-calibration and Linux

[Steyla]

Howdy Commanders,

FYI for all the Cmdrs who have Linux and Windows7 on their PC's.

A few weeks ago I wanted to take off from Farseer and when I started the vertical thrusters to lift off, my ship suddenly started to rotate on its vertical axis. This was a rather scary moment. I thought my X56 is broken. Later I found out that the XY axis where on a constant raw value of 65535. Which puts the cross hair in the joy.cpl properties in to the lower right corner. I found out that I just had to recalibrate it with the Saitek software and everything works OK again.

Today I finally figured out that it was linux which de-calibrated the joystick. This is especially a problem when you are, like me, thousands of ly out in to deep space landed on some planet. Best thing you can do is unplug your joysticks before starting linux. Or check with joy.cpl before you start ED. Because, AFAIK, the preflight check does only work if you are docked at a space station. Not when landed on a planet.


Fly/land safe.


o7

Cmdr Steyla

 

[EUS]

I've been dual booting linux and win7 for years, and using the X55 for over a year now, I've never had any issue like you describe, and my HOTAS is plugged in all the time.
I cannot even fathom how a separate OS would be able to overwrite drivers written for windows.
How did you reach your conclusion?

 

[mp4x]

Yep, I have an x56 and I just run the auto calibration feature of the software driver as Elite is loading. I know that sometimes, as you said, it will immediately bank and roll right when I go to take off, so I just run the calibration every time now. I have a Windows 10 and Linux Mint dual boot machine; Though it seems to happen wether I have recently been in Linux or not. Interestingly, Elite is the only game it does this. It has never happened outside of Elite and I do play WarThunder and the like. No idea what the connection might be

 

[Shadowdancer]

With the X52, you could fix most issues by unplugging it, plugging it back in, and moving all axes through their full range.

IME Linux gives less of a damn about explicitly powering down USB devices when turning the system off, so if you have stuff on ports that are permanently powered (thank you Asus for not making that dumb crap optional...), there may be residual state stuck in there that needs a good powercycling.