At one point or another, you have used a joystick or a gamepad of a video console. A joystick is nothing more than a series of buttons and potentiometers. With this device, you can perform or control a wide range of actions. When you connect your joystick to your computer, you are going to check whether the joystick is recognized using the following command:
$ ls /dev/input/
We will see the following output:
by-id event0 event2 event4 event6 event8 js0 mouse0 by-path event1 event3 event5 event7 event9 mice
The port created is js0; with the jstest command, we can check whether it is working, using the following code:
$ sudo jstest /dev/input/js0 Axes: 0: 0 1: 0 2: 0 Buttons: 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off 7:off 8:off 9:off 10:off
Our joystick, Logitech F710, has 8 axes and 11 buttons, and if we move the joystick, the values change.
In case you encounter the below error:
jstest: command not found
you may try installing below package as per your choice of distribution.
| Distribution | Command |
|---|---|
| Debian | apt-get install joystick |
| Ubuntu | apt-get install joystick |
| Arch Linux | pacman -S linuxconsole |
| Kali Linux | apt-get install joystick |
| CentOS | yum install linuxconsoletools |
| Fedora | dnf install linuxconsoletools |
| Raspbian | apt-get install joystick |
Summary
The terminal command jstest will enable you to determine the corresponding numbers of controller joysticks, buttons, and triggers.
To download and install the package, use the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install jstest-gtk
Then, plug your game controller into the USB port of your computer. The command to execute the game controller test program is:
$ jstest-gtk