A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a slew of information related to using the PS3 controller as a joystick on Linux. I immediately took my PS3 controller and started experimenting with the documentation out there for doing this sort of thing. Unfortunately however, not everything mentioned in this documentation worked correctly. For instance, I was not able to use a joystick on the controller to control the mouse without a separate piece of middleware. This was because the application I used (the only decent one I was able to find) to signal key presses for every button press on the controller, is unmaintained and had a blocker bug with mouse emulation.
You will need two components in order to make this work: the first being QJoyPad to bind controller buttons to keys, and JoyMouse to use one of the joysticks on the controller to control the mouse. Also remember that I am only using the USB cable to use the controller rather than using it via Bluetooth. I will post directions for using Bluetooth and the accelerometers in the controller at a later date, if I am able to get a hold of a Bluetooth adapter. Nevertheless, the tools are the same.
Filed under:Tags: configure, controller, Linux, playstation, ps3