Comment 5 for bug 492056

The problem with some joysticks is the way buttons are assigned and the special meaning certain buttons have. Basically every device has one button number which is the first button assigned and this has a special meaning in identifying the class of device. So the first button for joysticks is BTN_JOYSTICK, the first one for a gamepad BTN_GAMEPAD and BTN_DIGI is the first one for tablets. Any further buttons get a number of the first button + x. Unfortunately the number range is limited and nobody thought of devices with 40 buttons. So those end up with buttons that would normally stand for a completely different class of device.
And then (having BTN_DIGI defined) it is not considered a joystick because that would be a tablet and did cause tablets to come up as non functional joysticks.

So long story short, it has been worked on upstream and there is a patch. But its not yet in the main linux tree (maybe 2.6.34). But to try out whether its good I build Lucid kernels with the mentioned patch applied. So if anybody runs Lucid apha's has a X52 or similar with that problem, please give that kernel a try. You will find generic kernels at:
http://people.canonical.com/~smb/bug492056/