Spacenavd is a free software user-space driver (daemon), for 6-dof input devices, like 3Dconnexion's space-mice. It's compatible with the original 3dxsrv proprietary daemon provided by 3Dconnexion, and works as a drop-in replacement with any program that was written for the 3Dconnexion driver, but also provides an improved communication mechanism for programs designed specifically to work with spacenavd.
For more info on the spacenav project, visit: http://spacenav.sourceforge.net
We are currently in the process of documenting how button numbers relate to physical buttons, across all 6dof devices: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/spacenavd/wiki/Device-button-names
If you have a device which is missing from that wiki page, please help us expand the database by adding it, or send us the information through email.
Copyright (C) 2007-2022 John Tsiombikas [email protected]
This program is free software. Feel free to copy, modify and/or redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, or at your option, any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. See COPYING for details.
In order to compile the spacenavd daemon, you'll need the following:
- GNU C Compiler
- GNU make
- Xlib (libX11, optional)
- XInput2 (libXi, optional)
- Xtest (libXtst, optional)
You can compile the daemon without Xlib, but it won't be compatible with applications that where written for the original proprietary 3Dconnexion driver (e.g. maya, houdini, etc). The 3dxsrv compatibility interface needs to communicate with clients through the X window system. Programs designed to work with the alternative spacenavd-specific interface however (e.g. blender) will work fine even when spacenavd is built without X11 support.
If you have the dependencies installed, just run ./configure and then make
to compile the daemon, and then make install, to install it.The default
installation prefix is /usr/local. If you wish to install somewhere else, you
may pass --prefix=/whatever to the configure script.
Spacenavd is designed to run during startup as a system daemon.
If your system uses SysV init, then you may run setup_init as root, to install
the spacenavd init script, and have spacenavd start automatically during
startup. To start the daemon right after installing it, without having to reboot
your system, just type /etc/init.d/spacenavd start as root.
If your system uses BSD init or some other init system, then you'll have to
follow your init documentation to set this up yourself. You may be able to
use the provided init_script file as a starting point.
For systems running systemd, there is a spacenavd.service file under
contrib/systemd. Follow your system documentation for how to use it.
The spacenavd daemon reads a number of options from /etc/spnavrc. If
that file doesn't exist, then it will use default values for everything. An
example configuration file is included in the doc subdirectory, which you may
copy to /etc and tweak.
You may use the graphical spnavcfg program to interactively set and tweak any of the configuration options.
If you're having trouble running spacenavd, read the up to date FAQ on the spacenav website: http://spacenav.sourceforge.net/faq.html
If you're not sure if spacenavd is set up correctly and works with your device,
a good first step is to try and run the "simple" example program which comes
with libspnav. It builds into two variants: simple_af_unix and simple_x11,
which is helpful for testing both supported communication protocols. If either
or both fail to work, there's something wrong with your setup.
If you're still having trouble, send a description of your problem to the spacenav-users mailing list: [email protected] along with a copy of your /var/log/spnavd.log and any other relevant information.
If you have encountered a bug, please file a bug report in our bug tracker: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/spacenavd/issues