Comment 14 for bug 274203

Okay, with the help of my room mate on this problem, we have come up with a temporary work around. The problem seems to be with Xorg. Hal seems to detect the joystick properly, and passes the device on to Xorg. Everybody is happy, until Xorg wrongly configures the joystick as a mouse. The fix is to force X NOT to auto configure any devices, and manually configure the joystick in your Xorg. However the result of this, has been that I have lost functionality on my media keys on my keyboard. not too big a deal to me, since I can reach the volume on my speakers easily..... ;) So anyway, here comes the work around:

1. install the xserver joystick input driver:
     sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-joystick

2. Manually edit the xorg.conf to remove auto detection, setup a device for the joystick and include it in the server layout.
    * see attached xorg.conf

3. Restart x and be happy. ;)