Description

Simracing is somewhat a niche hobby, and very windows based. Still, it's software and hardware. Software this days is very supported on Linux/Steam using proton compatibility later, which is build in on Steam and easy to enable. So, most simulators work 'out of the box'.

Hardware is a little more tricky, but also not so much anymore, most devices are now compatible after a few years of requests and suggestions, in my case, mainly for the Simucube Devices, made by Granite Devices.

After some back and forts on the hardware firmware, we finally managed to make it fully work on Linux, with a few configurations and using wine, it may sound clunky but it works perfect. Wine is basically the initiator of the UI, which then initializes the wheelbase itself, after that all of this can even be closed as the hardware it now 'linked/connected' to the OS.

Goals

In the end I created a tutorial, which was endorsed by Granite Devices and used as their default how-to guide: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/UsingSimucubewheelbasein_Linux

The objective is to follow trough again, this time on my new machine that runs openSUSE Slowroll, and find caveats and improvements for the guide. At the same time, analyze the possibility of creation of an Linux agnostic script that could to the procedure, or, find some other software that already exists on git and extend it. But the most important think is that the tutorial still works perfect.

General wheel support overview: https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels

Simucube 2 uses SDL: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/joystick/SDL_joystick.c#L340