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October 5th 2006 at 7:40 am in Software A couple of months ago, I had bought the SmartJoy Plus adapter to connect my two Playstation 2 controllers, via USB, to my PC.
Initially, it didn’t work like I expected (it presented itself as 1 joystick rather than 2). After some tinkering and debugging I discovered that there is some blacklist defined in hid-core.c which sets some characteristics so the OS can work with it correctly, in which the relevant vendor- and device ID did not show up although similar devices were in there. Putting 2 and 2 together I decided to hack up an extra entry to see it it worked. Lo’ and behold: adding the vendor- and device ID of the device to some blacklist in hid-core.c actually worked — and the OS could read the devices properly; seeing 2 joysticks.
And that’s what I love about open source and this community thang working on high-tech stuff like that — something is wrong, or you don’t like something: you change it. Imagine the state of our world if all those companies were working on one and the same product in stead of trying to lock each of us into their own proprietary crap so they can make more money.
After noticing the modification worked, I immediately posted the resulting code (well, the patch adding one line, actually) to the linux-usb-devel list on the 30th of June, 2006. Being curious I also wrote this post to see how long it’d take before it was in the mainstream kernel.
On the 3rd of July, I got a notification telling me that gregkh had included my patch in his tree.
The 13th of July, all those patches (with mine included) was included as patches against linux-2.6.18-rc1, so it was about to be included in the 2.6.18 version of the linux kernel…
And I noticed yesterday that, while downloading the latest kernel to install on someones’ new MythTV box, since 20th of September, the 2.6.18 kernel is released — and my patch is in. Yay!
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