Linux Space Navigator Development Thread

[kraft]

A plug-in for beryl would be nice, the feel to manipulate for real desktop, windows etc

[shotgunefx]

A plug-in for beryl ?

One thing at a time

Question for you, I haven't even bothered to touch Beryl or Compiz yet as I had so many issues getting my laptop configured just so.

Got a link with more info on beryl plugins? I did some googling, but didn't find a good general explanation.

[kraft]

well apart the original http://www.beryl-project.org/
i have found nothing that can give a simple and straight overview
if you have questions, maybe forum can be helpfull http://forum.beryl-project.org/

[kraft]

http://www.beryl-project.org/userguide.php

maybe bindings ?

[shotgunefx]

I wanted to do a quick hack of this into Auto-DAC (my front end), but wasn't sure the best way to do it. With a little modification of the Perl bindings for SDL (exposing the ability to push events into the event que), and some tweaks of the code to insert the correct "fake" touchscreen events, it's done with surprisingly little effort.

All I can say is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so glad I picked one of these up. I'll barely be using the TS at all now. It works beautifully. I'll be posting some vids of it in action soon.

[kraft]

Thank you for the effort

You can draw your own keyboard and target each button with xautomation so you can get rid of the keyboard if any and the touchscreen as well.
I did it with the Mercedes in my signature with a simple powermate which has less functions.

[shotgunefx]

Thank you for the effort

You can draw your own keyboard and target each button with xautomation so you can get rid of the keyboard if any and the touchscreen as well.
I did it with the Mercedes in my signature with a simple powermate which has less functions.

xautomation was a great tip. I asked the author about a function for getting the current input window in xdotool, it should be pretty simple. If not, I'll just do a little doc searching and submit a patch.

The code I used outside of the tweaks to fake the SDL mouse events was the same as that posted here. Currently, I'm ignoring the fwd/back left/right axes.

Tilt Fwd/Back for scanning through the Playlist.
Tilt Left/Right is prev/next.
Rotate Left/Right is volume.
Push Down plays/queues
Right button toggles random mode.

I'm thinking a few things, for some devices, why let X handle it at all, especially on something that's supposed to be so context aware. The other thing I've been thinking is making this more generic since pretty much all input devices work this way. I could see taking over the touchscreen as well. At least for my front end. I haven't found where it's written, but testing seems to show that a number of readers can read the kernel input events, and all readers get all events (instead of FIFO).

For you python people, I found something similar to what I'm doing but it's already done and in Ubuntu's repository. Gizmo Daemon, The Linux Input Device Utility. Haven't installed it, but from the docs, it looks pretty slick.

One thing I can't figure out is how to get X to NOT detect a serial mouse. I want to take over the trackball shifter I have, but no matter what I do, X keeps finding it. I suppose it would be easier to use a PS/2 -> USB adapter and hide it then it would be modifying the mouse drivers for X.

[shotgunefx]

I've posted a video, nothing too special, just playing with the Space Navigator, controlling volume, playing/queuing songs. May want to skip ahead a minute or two.

@ Google video

[kraft]

Don't know what's happening with google but it's damn slow.
Could it be possible to post the video to youtube or dailymotion ?

[kraft]

I was just thinking that DBUS could be interesting to be used to interact with apps running inside the window manager.
To deactivate serial mouse you should use setserial and statserial to see which port you want to deactivate, with this you can forbid uart to send and receive events on one defined port.