How to use Thrustmaster pedals in CachyOS

General
1

I’ve been having problems with my Thrustmaster pedals in CachyOS. They work fine in debian based systems but I couldn’t even ‘see’ them in CachyOS.
Forget xinput and libinput - they don’t help and libinput only recognises a few input things.

Get evtest from the repo and then run:

sudo evtest and that will list all input devices found. in my case:
o device specified, trying to scan all of /dev/input/event*
Available devices:
/dev/input/event0: Power Button
/dev/input/event1: Power Button
/dev/input/event10: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=9
/dev/input/event11: HDA Intel PCH Rear Mic
/dev/input/event12: HDA Intel PCH Front Mic
/dev/input/event13: HDA Intel PCH Line
/dev/input/event14: HDA Intel PCH Line Out
/dev/input/event15: HDA Intel PCH Front Headphone
/dev/input/event16: Thrustmaster T-Rudder
/dev/input/event17: Logitech Logitech Extreme 3D
/dev/input/event2: Logitech USB Optical Mouse
/dev/input/event3: Logitech Wireless Keyboard PID:4023
/dev/input/event4: Logitech Wireless Mouse
/dev/input/event5: PC Speaker
/dev/input/event6: HP WMI hotkeys
/dev/input/event7: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=3
/dev/input/event8: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=7
/dev/input/event9: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=8

You have the option to select the device and are able to test the inputs onscreen - no fancy graphics, just a text display but you can see what is working and the default limits etc. CTRL-C to exit.

Then just do this: sudo chmod 0666 /dev/input/eventX - where X is the device number.

The event number may not be constant. It will remain the same until a reboot or unplugging of the device. Not tested thoroughly on CachyOS but that is the case on Debian/Mint/Pop!_OS.

This worked for me running the Plasma desktop on X11. I don’t know if it works on Wayland as I haven’t tried it yet. I use the pedals in flight mode in X-Plane-12.

2

run ls -l /dev/input/by-id/

create /etc/udev/rules.d/99-thrustmaster.rules and add (edit as necessary):

KERNEL==“event*”, ATTRS{idVendor}==“044f”, ATTRS{idProduct}==“b679”, SYMLINK+=“input/thrustmaster_pedals”

then

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Just another way to do it. :sign_of_the_horns:

3

I will save that solution :smiley:

Will it work if you reboot or plug the pedals into a different USB slot? I
I found that the pedals were recognized if switched to driver mode but not when in airplane mode.

I will try your solution as it is tidier than mine!

4

Port won’t matter and will persist.

5

Thanks, that’s a better solution. I’ll try that on Debian as well :grin:

6

udevadm may not be in Debian. But if not, it will have something similar.

7

Your solution works great but you still have to look and see which event is triggered because it can be a different one when the pedals are plugged in. all the /dev/input/event* files are not writeable by default so it has to be enabled for the session.

The writable status will persist but as soon as you do an update they will revert to read only.
It’s not a big deal once you know - just have to remember to do it before starting X-Plane or whatever application you will be using with them.