How do I disable joystick input?

Question

The file /dev/input/js0 related to joysticks is giving me some problems in games.

I just renamed the file and everything went to normal.
So, how do I disable joystick input? I am using Ubuntu 12.04.

Answer 1

If your actual issue is that your Microsoft keyboard gets recognized as a joystick, you are not alone, it affects several people.

My solution for that is to download this file and save it as /etc/udev/rules.d/51-these-are-not-joysticks.rules. You can run this command on a terminal:

sudo curl -o /etc/udev/rules.d/51-these-are-not-joysticks.rules \ 
  https://gist.githubusercontent.com/denilsonsa/978f1d842cf5430f57f6/raw

Link to my GitHub Gist containing the file: https://gist.github.com/denilsonsa/978f1d842cf5430f57f6

---

[years later]

After many contributions, that little file grew and moved from that GitHub Gist to a full GitHub repository: https://github.com/denilsonsa/udev-joystick-blacklist, and many distros started incorporating that workaround.

Answer 2

You should see your joystick number first... so open a terminal and run xinput list and look to your joystick number and replace its number (instead of the 10) in the example below.

#!/bin/bash
id=xinput list | grep "↳ DragonRise Inc. Generic USB Joystick id=10" | cut -c58-59
props_mouse=xinput list-props 10 | grep "Generate Mouse Events (" | cut -c25-27
props_teclado=xinput list-props 10 | grep "Generate Key Events (" | cut -c23-25
xinput set-prop 10 $props_mouse 0
xinput set-prop 10 $props_teclado 0

Save the above into a file like ~/disable_joystick.sh and then run chmod +x ~/disable_joystick.sh.

You can now run ~/disable_joystick.sh and it should block your device from generating mouse and keyboard events in X.