When upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, your joystick becomes a mouse. One of the simplist workarounds that I found was to drop a file called joystick.fdi into /etc/hal/fdi/policy to tell X not to use the joystick as an input device. It will still work in VO, however.

An example joystick.fdi:

-------------CUT HERE----------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="YOUR JOYSTICK NAME HERE">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string"></merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
-------------CUT HERE----------------------

Replace "YOU JOYSTICK HERE" with the name of your joystick as found by doing something like:

lshal | grep info.product

and searching through the (probably long) list for your joystick.

Edit: This _may_ only be for amd64.

Note: This would happen in any distribution using X input device hotplugging. Which I imagine will be all of them as the updates trickle in.

Thanks LostCause!

this has been fixed in ubuntu proposed already and should be in the main repo now.