The Fugue

My Radium 61 MIDI controller (read: MIDI keyboard that doesn't make any sound of its own accord) has worked great in Linux from day one, but it was always a bit of a pain to get set up.

When the keyboard is plugged in (USB), it needs firmware uploaded to it before it will show up as a USB MIDI device. In the past the way this is done has changed several times. In the devfs days you did one thing. Then someone wrote a package that made it even simpler. Then udev came along and messed everything up. Then udev changed and messed everything up. Then it happened again (stupid udev). Then I brought my keyboard to school and only used it with OS X for a year or so, and now here we are.

Now Ubuntu 8.04 has a package midisport-firmware which installs the firmware and the udev rules. Awesome! Except, it doesn't work. It turns out that the midisport-firmware package (which obviously must be coming from Debian unstable, or it would probably work) depends on usbfs, and apparently Ubuntu has disabled it. Or broken it. Or something. The fix is quite easy: uncomment the four lines under the comment "Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work" in /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh, then issue /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start. It should Just Work™ in the future after reboots.