One last thing ?

Does anyone know if the Logitech Freedom 3D cordless / wireless works on Ubuntu out of the box etc.

Please advise

You don't run the G13's joystick with your right hand. You use your left hand to control the entire unit - fingers on keys and thumb on joystick. Then your right hand is free to run the mouse or a proper joystick. In my case, I use a normal joystick on my right hand for steering, roll, firing, basic targeting (nearest and in-front), and forward/backward. I will use the G13 joystick with my left thumb for strafing left/right and up/down. My left hand's fingers will run auxiliary functions such as turbo, toggling auto-aim, brakes, jettison, sector list, nav window, target cycling, etc.

I already know that this works well for me, because that's the control scheme I've been using with my Nostromo n52 for the last year, and I love it. The n52 is similar to the G13, but with a d-pad instead of a mini-joystick, fewer keys, no LCD screen, and a lower price tag.

You could use your right hand on a mouse instead of a separate joystick, but I've never had any problems with needing to switch rapidly. I don't use the mouse for anything at all while in combat, unless I need to plot a nav route. But I keep the mouse to the right of the joystick, so I can switch back and forth pretty easily if I need to. (As opposed to if it were on the left of the joystick - I'd have to go over or around the stick to reach the mouse.)

The real benefit from a controller like the G13 is comfort. I bought mine because after 20 minutes of action-packed PvP my left wrist would be killing me from strafing all over the place.

VO has awesome joystick support, and you can use multiple sticks and bind the axes to pretty much whatever you want them to. I wish more games did!

Yeah. VO is really nice like that. I was trying to get the G13's joystick to work as an analog joystick with Oblivion (in Windows) with no luck. Oblivion doesn't even let you select which joystick should be used, so I had to unplug my real joystick and both game pads to stop it from trying to use them instead. Even then, it doesn't see the joystick when it's in analog mode, and I'd rather stick with the n52 and its dpad for Oblivion if the alternative is a joystick in digital mode.

So yeah, Guild outdid Bethesda in my book. Congrats.

Just a quick warning - openSuse 11.3 is giving me sever problems getting my G13 running.

The suto config file used for compiling was moved so you get implied usage errors AND they did a house cleaning recently to make the code base more compliant so you have to edit some files to include a completely unrelated header that is missing somewhere in the stdlib.h file and add a sym link into your kernel files.

And just for fun neither the old or new driver responds to any commands.
The old driver instructions were removed and the new driver instructions are rather poor.