The PS3 Sixaxis and DualShock3 bluetooth controllers are a great for gaming on your PS3 but will work just as well under Linux. With this guide you will be able to configure them to work on your Ubuntu Linux 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) PC in USB as well as wireless bluetooth mode.

There are a variety of solutions out there but they are either overly complex, or because of the ever changing state of Linux bluetooth support, they are somewhat outdated. The advantage of this solution is that it is simple, and requires only slight modification to the default versions of the bluez-utils packages (bluez-4.12). This minimizes possible conflicts and eliminates unneeded configuration.

This guide specifically covers Ubuntu Linux 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) but I’m sure similar steps can be taken for other distributions.

Installation

Install the hidd daemon located in the bluez-compat package.

$ sudo apt-get bluez-compat joystick

The hidd daemon in the bluez-compat package has been deprecated but it provides the only way to connect with the PS3 controller. It will not interfere with the current bluetooth service.

From this point you can take one of two roads.

1. If you are on 32bit (i386) or 64bit (amd64) versions of Ubuntu I have precompiled all the binaries you will need. Simply download the corresponding tarball for your architecture and follow a couple simple steps to complete the setup.
2. The other option is to manually patch and compile the binaries yourself. This is a bit more time consuming but not anymore difficult as I have documented the exact steps for this method as well. This option is necessary if you are on some other architecture (PowerPC, etc.) or if you experience any problems with the precompiled binaries I provided.

Option 1: Download Precompiled Binaries

You can test which architecture you are using by running uname.

$ uname -a

Linux xps 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 19:33:06 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Download the tarball of binaries which corresponds to your architecture.
bluez-compat_ps3_amd64.tgz
bluez-compat_ps3_i386.tgz

Untar the files.

$ tar xzvf bluez-compat_ps3_<arch>.tgz

bluez-compat_4.12-0ubuntu5_amd64.deb
sixpair

Skip down to the Install the Updated Package section.

Option 2: Patch and Compile Binaries

Download the hidd daemon patch:
patch-hidd-3.19-pabr3

Install the dpkg-dev and fakeroot which will allow you to compile the blues-utils package.

$ sudo apt-get dpkg-dev fakeroot

Install the blues-utils package, apply the patch, and build the package.

$ sudo apt-get source bluez-utils
$ sudo apt-get build-dep bluez-utils
$ patch bluez-4.12/compat/hidd.c patch-hidd-3.19-pabr3
$ cd bluez-4.12
$ sudo dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
$ cd ../

This will build all the bluez related packages, the only one we are interested in is bluez-compat.

Download the sixpair.c source code:
sixpair.c

Install the libusb-dev and libusb-0.1-4 which will allow you to compile the sixpair utility.

$ sudo apt-get libusb-dev libusb-0.1-4

Build the sixpair utility.

$ gcc -o sixpair sixpair.c -lusb

Install the Updated Package

At this point you should have either downloaded or compiled the bluez-compat package.

Install the patched bluez-compat package.

$ sudo dpkg -i bluez-compat_4.12-0ubuntu5_<arch>.deb

Optional: if you will dist-upgrade your system, the process will overwrite your modified package with newer versions. You can either choose to redo the above steps every time a new version of bluez-utils is packaged, or “hold” the package. This should work with both apt and aptitude.

$ sudo echo bluez-compat hold | sudo dpkg --set-selections

Bluetooth Pairing

With the updated package in place, you can now follow steps will get the PS3 controller paired with your Ubuntu system. This step only needs to be performed once as it will remain successfully paired with Ubuntu between uses. If you reconnect/re-pair the controller with the PS3 however, you will have to repeat this step.

If you want to setup multiple controllers, repeat this step for each one individually.

Run the following command to view the system log messages as they are generated.

$ watch -n 1 "tail /var/log/messages"

Plug in PS3 controller with USB cable. You should see output similar to the following system log in the terminal.

Apr  4 11:06:40 xps kernel: [ 9666.789711] input: Sony PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input23
Apr  4 11:06:40 xps kernel: [ 9666.834506] input,hiddev96,hidraw3: USB HID v1.11 Joystick [Sony PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2

The lights will blink indicating that the controller is communicating with the system.

Press the PS button (clear button in the center of the gamepad). This will acknowledge the controller connection sequence and the controller will become activated.

Check that the /dev/input/js0 device exists at this point.

$ls /dev/input/js*

/dev/input/js0

You can test the controller by running either of the following commands. jscalibrator opens a GUI window and allows you you calibrate your buttons. jstest shows the raw output from the buttons themselves. Make sure you have pressed the PS button on the controller if you aren’t getting any response.

$ jscalibrator -d /dev/input/js0

or

$ jstest /dev/input/js0

The lights will continue to blink indefinitely as long as the controller is connected, this is normal. There is no way at this point to disable them but the controller will operate correctly over USB.

Execute the sixpair utility. This will tell the PS3 controller to look for your Ubuntu bluetooth master device and not the PS3 itself when it attempts to connect over bluetooth.

$ sudo ./sixpair

Current Bluetooth master: 00:1f:e1:e3:48:YY
Setting master bd_addr to 00:1f:e1:e3:48:YY

You should now disconnect the controller from the USB cable. It will remain paired with the Ubuntu system from this point forward.

Initiate Connection

By now you should have installed the updated package and successfully paired the PS3 controller with your Ubuntu system. Until you reconnect/re-pair the controller to the PS3 you can simply repeat this step each time you want to use your controller.

For the controller to successfully connect with your Ubuntu system you will have to temporarily disable the default bluetooth service and start the hidd daemon instead.

Stop the bluetooth service.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop

Run the hidd daemon. The ‘-n‘ will stop it from running in the background and you can see its output in the terminal.

$ sudo hidd --server --nocheck -n

hidd[14407]: Bluetooth HID daemon

In a separate terminal run the hcidump command below. It will show you the current bluetooth traffic as it happens.

$ sudo hcidump -t -V -x

Press the PS button (clear button in the center of the gamepad). This will cause the controller to begin its connection sequence. You should see the hidd daemon accept the connection and print something similar to the output below. Pay attention to the bold text below. This is your bluetooth PS3 controller address which you will need later to ultimately disconnect the controller.

hidd[13149]: New HID device 00:16:FE:D7:8C:XX (Sony Computer Entertainment Wireless Controller)

The system log should also show the following.

Apr  4 11:09:52 xps kernel: [ 6258.750437] input: Sony Computer Entertainment Wireless Controller as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.2/usb7/7-2/7-2.1/7-2.1:1./bluetooth/hci0/hci0:11/input22

hcidump should start reporting a large amount of bluetooth traffic from the PS3 controller. Here’s a snippet of the sample output below.

2009-04-04 11:10:04.745725 > ACL data: handle 11 flags 0x02 dlen 54
    L2CAP(d): cid 0x0041 len 50 [psm 19]
      HIDP: Data: Input report
      01 00 00 00 00 00 86 88 78 79 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
      00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 05 14 FF C8 00 00 23 5E 77 01
      81 01 FE 01 E8 01 8F 00 02
2009-04-04 11:10:04.757745 > ACL data: handle 11 flags 0x02 dlen 54
    L2CAP(d): cid 0x0041 len 50 [psm 19]
      HIDP: Data: Input report
      01 00 00 00 00 00 86 88 78 79 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
      00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 05 14 FF C8 00 00 23 5E 77 01
      81 01 FE 01 E7 01 8F 00 02

Check that the /dev/input/js0 device exists once again.

$ls /dev/input/js*

/dev/input/js0

You can verify the controller is correctly working over bluetooth by once again running either jscalibrator or jstest.

$ jscalibrator -d /dev/input/js0

or

$ jstest /dev/input/js0

Congratulations! You have successfully connected your PS3 controller. As before, the lights will continue to blink as long as the controller is connected. You can operate the controller and map its buttons just like any other joystick or gamepad.

If you are wanting to connect multiple controllers that were successfully paired in the previous step, press the PS button for each one. You should see that a device (/dev/input/js*) is created for each one.

Kill the hidd daemon by pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal window. You no longer need this as the the PS3 controller is now connected.

You can now restart the bluetooth service to resume the normal operation of bluetooth devices on your system. The controller will continue to operate normally.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

Terminate Connection

The PS3 controller doesn’t hibernate and power off like it does when paired with the PS3. To conserve your battery, once you are done with it you need to “unplug” the controller from the system with the following command. Use the bluetooth address you saved from initiating the connection.

$ sudo hidd --unplug 00:16:FE:D7:8C:XX

The lights on the controller will go dark once it has been successfully unplugged.

If you want to reconnect/re-pair the controller to your PS3, simply reattach the controller to the PS3 with the USB cable and press the PS button.

Summary

Once you have successfully installed the package and are comfortable with the pairing and connection process you can eliminate all the debugging steps.

Here is a quick reference for the pairing and connection process.

Bluetooth Paring (only if you need to re-pair with Ubuntu)

(connect controller with USB cable)
$ sudo ./sixpair
(disconnect controller from USB cable)

Initiate Connection

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop
$ sudo hidd --server --nocheck -n
(press the PS button on controller to connect)
(terminate hidd Ctrl+C)
$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

Terminate Connection

$ sudo hidd --unplug 00:16:FE:D7:8C:XX

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Hardware support in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) for the Dell XPS M1530 and M1330 is very impressive. However in certain cases the process is not as straight forward as it could be, and it takes a bit of tinkering in order to get it to work. In this article I will go through how to enable audio and video through the HDMI output.

The first step is making sure that the HDMI cable is connected between the computer and external monitor, HDTV, etc.

Video Support

To enable the video you need to go to your NVIDIA X Server Settings manager. This of course assumes you are using the NVIDIA driver on your system.

System -> Administration -> NVIDIA X Server Settings

Select the X Server Display Configuration. Click the Detect Displays button and you external monitor should be displayed. Click on the external screen so that it becomes selected and click the Configure button and select the TwinView option.

Once this monitor is enabled a Position dropdown box should appear. It is best in most cases to select Clones.The screen output will be duplicated on both devices.

Select the Apply button for these changes to take effect.

If your external monitor has a lower resolution than your laptop screen it may help to disable the laptop screen so that maximized video won’t go beyond the borders of your external monitor. To do this click the laptop screen so that it becomes selected, click the Configure button, and select Disabled.

Audio Support

Open the Volume Control manager, usually ou can click on the volume applet on the top GNOME panel.

Make sure your device is set to HDA Intel (Alsa Mixer).

Select the Switches tab and put a check mark next to IEC958. Selecting this enables audio output over the HDMI connection.

If you want to disable audio output through your laptop speakers you can disable them. Go back to the Playback tab and mute the Front channel.

Bugs

1) Enabling the laptop screen as well an external monitor through HDMI can cause X to freeze with certain Compiz-Fusion effects such as desktop switching. Disabling Compiz-Fusion or disabling the laptop screen while operating in this mode fixes this issue.

2) Disabling the laptop monitor will not correctly resize the GNOME desktop to match the resolution of the external monitor over HDMI. However video playback will still be correctly maximized.

3) Audio output over HDMI connection may not work for a specific program even if everything has been configured correctly. Restarting this program usually fixes this issue.

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The ability to remotely SSH into a machine running an Ubuntu LiveCD can come in handy in many situations. The LiveCD supports a large variety of hardware and can be used to troubleshoot system problems on a machine where you have limited or no access. A user with limited skills can easily setup remote access and allow a trusted friend to troubleshoot the system from another location.

The first thing to start the process is to open a terminal. Follow these menus:

Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

In the terminal install the ssh server on your LiveCD system.

$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server

The server is started automatically after installing.

To login remotely, you’ll need to set the password for the default ubuntu user.

$ sudo passwd ubuntu
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

You should now be able to login to the system running the LiveCD. But first you need to find the IP address of the machine so you can connect to it.

The ifconfig command will list your network interfaces and along with it your IP address.

$ ifconfig

eth0      ...
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          ...

The inet addr entry is your IP address which you need to log into the LiveCD system. As you an see above the IP address begins with “192.168” which indicates that the IP address is only valid on the local network. It was an address assigned to the machine by the router. This is fine if you plan on logging in from another machine on this local network.

If you need to access the machine from outside your local network you have a couple of options. The first is to remove any router between you and the Internet. This should give you a valid IP address which is accessible from outside your local network. You may also be able to access your router’s administration panel and tell it to pass SSH traffic to the IP address of the LiveCD system. You will then use the router’s IP address instead for the next step.

If your IP address already begins with something other than “192.168” then you are safe as well. You should be able to access the LiveCD system from any location, local or not.

Using the IP address from the previous step you can now log into the LiveCD system as the ubuntu user. Use the password you created earler.

$ ssh ubuntu@<IP Address>

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To give a specific user access to sudo without having to enter a password you have to edit the /etc/sudoers configuration file. For security reasons you should only edit the file using the visudo command.

$ sudo visudo

In Ubuntu the following lines are placed at the bottom of /etc/sudoers by default. This gives your default user access to sudo as well as any other user in the admin group.

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

If you want to allow sudo access without passwords for all users in the admin group you can simply add the NOPASSWD option to this line and be done.

%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

If you want to give a specific user sudo access without passwords, you will have to add an additional line for each user. These lines will conflict with the default admin line above so they must be placed at the end of the sudoers file. The reason for this is that sudo will handle contradicting configuration lines by giving priority to the line closest to the bottom of the file.

Add the following line to the end of the file, replace ‘ryan’ with your username.

ryan    ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Add a line for each user that you wish to have access.

For more ways to use and configure sudo have a look here.

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To get Skype audio working with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) and Dell XPS M1530/M1330 requires a few changes to the standard install.

Make sure you have added the medibuntu repository and installed Skype.

You need to enable the embedded microphone. Go to Volume Control by clicking on the volume icon. In Preferences select Digital Input Source. This will enable the Digital Mic 1 option which you should select.

Now launch Skype and go into Options -> Sound Devices. Select “HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0)” for Sound In, Sound Out, and Ringing.

Go ahead and make a test call to verify that everything is working correctly.

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The Medibuntu repository (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) contains packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons. Some of these packages include Skype Acrobat Reader, Google Earth, and multimedia codecs.

Add Medibuntu to your sources.list. Make sure you specify the correct version of your distribution. This example uses Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10).

# wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Then add its GPG key to your keyring.

# apt-get update && apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && apt-get update

Now you should be able to install packages in this repository.

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