A few months ago, i discovered an awesome game called Frets on Fire, a Guitar Hero© like game, but with some interesting features, like convert any music you want, or possibility to write mods.

OK, so the next step was discovering how to run it on Linux, but, surprisingly it had versions for Windows©, MAC© and Linux©! Great i thought, but i need to play on keyboard, this sucks, i want to play with that toy guitar and feel like the greatest stars. Googling about it i discovered that could work with guitars for PS2© / PS3© / Xbox©.

The roadmap

So, first thing was to install and run the game: it was pretty straight. Playing with keyboard works nice, but it's not the same experience.

Second, buy the guitar and some adapter (PS2/3 -> USB) : there is a lot out there.

When the assets arrived, i was wondering if it would really work. I readed about using joysticks in Ubuntu, and it seemed to be pretty simple:

1. Install a utility called "joystick" typing "sudo apt-get install joystick" or using synaptics
2. Use the commands "jstest" to test and "jscal" to calibrate.
3. Plugged in the adpater and searched for it in /dev/input/js0: it was there!
   

Right after, typed "jscal --normal js0" to calibrate the joystick-guitar and it was done!

Well, with Windows, you would need to search for the driver over thousands and be able to install it if you're a heavy user. The other steps remains almost the same.

Resuming:

Linux:
Plug in the adapter, install the driver ("joystick" program that we've apt-get before) start the game and play!

Windows:
Plug in the adapter, wait for windows install the required drivers, search and download the correct driver (does not came with guitars), calibrate it and then play!

Of course, Windows was not so hard again, but the irony here is, over and over again, that Linux was a little bit easier to handle. Although the explanation seems complicated, it was there just to you understand how i did it, but when resuming you can see how simple it is.

Linux, can i plug n play now? of course dear master...

I've recently won an ipod like gadget, and decided to just plug-in (on my notebook with Ubuntu© 8.04) to see what happens. Using Windows©, it would be necessary to install drivers first with the player unplugged, then plug in and install software to use it in many ways it's possible. I confess that i believed this could work for the first time with some tricks like Windows on my Ubuntu, but i got surprised when Music Player (i didn't know it was installed) just poped up to my screen ready to use - here you read use as copy/play/browse files and resources. Although it's not so difficult in Windows too, it's a little harder, and this was the stronger argument from Windows users over the years while Linux© had been growing. Microsoft© always was reference in usability, but i think they have some work to do until they reach the advances Linux distros  has been developing. Who's hard to use now?