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

= Modes of operation = SpaceNavigator can be operated in two mutually exclusive modes:
 * 1) as a 2D mouse controlled by Xorg
 * 2) as a 3D mouse controlled by a particular application, e.g. Blender

= Xorg xinput device = You can use your SpaceNavigator as a mouse without any additional drivers except for Kernel Event Support and xf86-input-evdev with

Once you restart Xorg and unplug-replug the device you can list supported properties and current values:

These keys can be used to alter the current configuration, for example:

= Supported applications =

Blender
To enable SpaceNavigator support for Blender you need to enable use flag "3dmouse"

or

= 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

You could also make udev start the daemon for you when a SpaceNavigator is plugged in:

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.

Note : More information on the daemon could be find in the log file /var/log/spnavd.log.

= Links =
 * Website of spacenav tools at SourceForge (libspnav, spacenavd, spnavcfg and other)
 * Official spacenav FAQ