Xinput controller support in the Driver Station
Most usb controllers are: HID for use with DirectInput (like the Logitech Attack3 Joystick), XInput devices meant to interact with XInput (like most modern game controllers, and the Xbox360 controller), or hybrid controllers with a hardware button that switches between the two modes.
So while it was all rather muddled, I asked if it was possible for the Driver Station to have a button in the Setup tab that switched in between using either XInput or DirectInput, which would give most controllers their expected functionality (in the case of the Xbox360 controller and others), but also open up the spectrum of devices teams are allowed to use. I also asked if DirectInput was kept as the sole controller input scheme because of devices like the Attack3 joystick, which is a HID (DirectInput) device.
How It Relates To Multiple OS support
One of the barriers to porting the DS per your earlier explanation was the use of DirectInput in the Driver Station on Windows.
DirectInput was phased out in 2005 by Microsoft in favor of X Input. X Input can be found across all distributions (man pages are available for both
OSX and
Linux), while DirectInput by default is not there. Given that one of the reasons the DS is not portable was the fact that it relies solely on DirectInput, then adding X Input support in the DS would let us use controllers with the DS on either OSX or Linux.
This may account for your broken arrow & joystick problem (the light was green with no joystick plugged in, right?), as DirectInput is not by default a part of OSX. However, HID Manager and a Leopard API exist for OSX which can effectively replace DirectInput on the Mac.
Regarding some of the other cross-OS problems, detecting network interfaces on OSX and Linux and then setting their ip addresses is very easy. Try typing ifconfig in your shell on your Mac sometime.