spnavcfg

About

Spacenav daemon interactive configuration program.

Compatibility

The current version of spnavcfg works with spacenavd v1.0 or higher (requires a spacenavd which speaks the spnav protocol v1).

This break in compatibility is necessary because the new protocol allows spnavcfg to act as a regular libspnav client and send configuration commands through the spacenavd socket, instead of having to modify /etc/spnavrc and send SIGHUP to the daemon, as was the old mode of operation.

This is a huge security improvement, as it makes it no longer necessary to install spnavcfg as setuid-root, and frankly much less clunky and error-prone. Plus it opens the way for a new and improved GUI with much more functionality and user feedback.

Therefore, you are advised to update your spacenavd to the latest version if at all possible. If you can't update spacenavd, the last version of spnavcfg which will work with older versions of the daemon is 0.3.1.

Installation

First make sure you have the dependencies installed:

• libspnav v1.0 or higher
• Qt 5 or Qt 6 (core, gui, and widgets)

To build just run ./configure, make, and make install as usual. The make install part will probably need to be executed as root, if you're installing system-wide.

Configure will try to detect which version of Qt to use. If you have both installed, and would like to force it to use one or the other, you can pass --qt5 or --qt6 to configure. If configure fails to find your Qt installation, you can use --qt-tooldir=... to point it to the directory containing the moc, uic, and rcc binaries.

For build options, see ./configure --help.

Note: if you cloned the source code from the git repo without GIT-LFS, the image in icons/devices.png will be invalid leading to an incorrect build and crashes on startup. If you don't want to install GIT-LFS, you can grab the file from the latest release archive and drop it in place.

License

Copyright (C) 2007-2025 John Tsiombikas [email protected]

This program is free software. Feel free to use, 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.

FAQ

1. Q: I'm trying to build spnavcfg, but the linker complains about missing functions starting with spnav_cfg_.

   A: spnavcfg uses libspnav to communicate with spacenavd. Most likely, you have an older version of libspnav installed, which lacks some feature required by the current version of spnavcfg. Make sure you have the latest version of libspnav installed, and remove any previous versions of libspnav from the system. Also on GNU/Linux make sure to run ldconfig as root, after installing libspnav.

2. Q: When I ran spnavcfg, it immediately crashes with a SIGFPE.

   A: This is most likely caused by bulding with an invalid device atlas image. If you cloned the source code from git, you need GIT-LFS to correctly retreive the image from the repo. Without GIT-LFS, the file icons/devices.png will be a text file with a hash instead of a PNG file. If you don't want to install GIT-LFS, grab the file from the latest release archive and drop it in.