I had the controller working in Retroarch at one point but now it doesn’t. If I start RA with the controller driver enabled it won’t accept input from either the keyboard or controller. I can however alt+tab to kill RA.
The problem still exists with a clean retroarch.cfg located beneath my user directory.
The controller is working fine with EmulationStation.
Can someone advise how to troubleshoot this?
Figured out a clumsy fix : Navigate to /usr/share/libretro/autoconfig/ Move or delete the contents of the directory.
Would be better to narrow it down more but was quicker this way 
Yeah, because it’s easier than changing the path in the Settings Tab --> Directory --> Input Device Autoconfig Dir
You might want to take into account in future that when people ask for help on forum’s they generally aren’t sure of the best way to accomplish something, I made that abundantly clear in my post as well. I’m confused as to why you turned up after the fact with the intention of making me feel like a fool? Anyway if you want to make a name for yourself as a troll go right ahead, just don’t expect to gain any respect from it.
Back on topic: If removing everything from the autoconfig dir fixed the issue RA must have already been pointing there, so changing that setting would be fruitless. Clearly one of the files in there had a corrupt setting.
He meant changing it to another directory so it wouldn’t be able to find them. It’s the same effect as deleting them except they’re still there in case you need to go back to them at some point. Not a big deal either way.
Deleting the contents from /usr/share/libretro/autoconfig/ may will break the retroarch-joypad-autoconfig package.
Have you see this thread? http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3395
Xbox joystick should work out-of-box on ubuntu 15.04 or newer (kernel >= 3.14), without the xboxdrv. Last time I tested my wireless joypad, it was working on RA,