Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released

As I'm a win32 gamer, I have a logitech dual action joypad. This used to be happily ignored by X server, but no longer. The left stick appears to produce events that position the mouse in screen. It can't be used for UI because the mouse position is absolute, not relative, so it reflects the degree that I have pushed the left analog stick. That makes fine control impossible and the stick thus useless.

The real problem? It's a noisy stick. Every few minutes it reads an event that makes X think I had moved the stick, with the end result that I now have a mouse pointer that occasionally jumps in the middle of the screen, interrupting what I'm doing in another window due to focus-follows-mouse.

When investigating the issue closer, I happened to press a button on the controller. Boom! Instant X segfault, with message: "Unable to handle keycode 296". At least it said something before dying...

I guess this is what betas are for: for beating some sense into the programs.