SpaceNavigator

= Information = This article is written for the SpaceNavigator but it should work with other 3D mouse in the Space-series produced by 3Dconnexion. Only applications that support 3D mouse device can work properly with this driver. For now, only blender support it in the portage tree.

= Kernel configuration = To be able to use spacenavd used in this article you need to compile your kernel with input evdev support

= make.conf = To get other applications to know about your SpaceNavigator mouse you should add 3dmouse use flag to to your make.conf

= spacenavd = To get 3D mouse working properly you will need spacenavd.

After installing spacenavd you could check out the following file before starting anything, normally default values works for everyone.

When finished you can start the spacenavd with

And add it to start up as default with

If everything worked correctly you should now have a working device in blender (it must be emerge with 3dmouse useflag).

Alternative x11 events
By default, the spacenavd daemon use the uevent mechanism but can alternatively use x11 socket to handle events. Most of the time, uevents should be enough to use the 3D mouse in supported applications but Xevents has one advantage, it's capable of handle proprietary driver protocol Magellan. But if your application doesn't run on top of X proprietary driver is useless. More information on What's wrong with the proprietary driver ? or What is provided by the spacenav project?, read the official FAQ (see links following).

If you want to use X events support, you must enable it with the X use flag on build time and the spacenavd daemon must be notified of this new protocol with

To start generating Spacenav X events by default you should add this command in your user startup scripts such as ~/.gnomerc or ~/.xinitrc.

Note : Those protocols aren't exclusive, both protocols can be build together, programs that choose to use the X11 protocol, are automatically compatible with either the free spacenavd driver or the proprietary driver.

= Extra =

Optionally you can add the following ebuild to configure dynamically the spacenavd.



The changes are immediately transmit to the spacenavd daemon that modify its behavior as requested.

= Links =

website of spacenav tools (libspnav, spacenavd, spnavcfg and other)

official spacenav FAQ

Alucowie 20:22, 7 February 2012 (UTC)