Handling weird input devices

[Giles Orr]

The short version: I bought a Contour Shuttle Xpress
(http://www.contourdesign.com/shuttlepro/shuttlexpress.htm).  I'd like
to get it working (ie. be able to map all the buttons and dials to
functions of my choosing) with Debian testing (amd64).  Should I use
gizmod (which has never worked for me in the past) or the much more
ancient evrouter (which is much praised, but seems to have been
abandoned five years ago), or is there some other program or method
better suited to this?

The long version: Many years ago I bought a Griffin Powermate
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin_powermate) - essentially a large
knob, looks like it's from an old stereo.  Except that it attaches via
USB and glows blue.  At the time, the best choice to get it working
with Linux was powermated
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/powermated/) which is a bit of a pig
to set up, but works.  I adore the Powermate: when someone calls, I
don't have to find my music application (which desktop did I leave it
on?), I just poke the Powermate and it pauses (or restarts) the music.
 powermated is now deprecated in favour of the more generic gizmod
(http://gizmod.sourceforge.net/) which - in theory - can work with the
Powermate and any specialty buttons on weird keyboards or devices.
I've spent perhaps six hours over several days fighting with gizmod
(most recently about a year ago) and I found that in debug mode it
would acknowledge any push or twist on the Powermate correctly, but
nothing I did with the config files would actually make them _do_
anything.  That sent me back to powermated, but obviously that's not
going to work quite as well with a new device.  I've never tried
evrouter, and it seems unwise to start when it appears abandoned.  But
I'm less than inspired by gizmod too.  gizmod is available as a Debian
package, evrouter isn't.  xev shows most of the buttons on the Xpress
do nothing at all by default, and those that do something are hard to
map because they're indistinguishable from mouse button clicks.

Does anyone have experience with gizmod or the Shuttle Xpress under
Linux?  Thanks.

If I've failed to provide needed information, let me know.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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