SpaceMouse Support

[mattiasgronlund]

I had problems getting my SpaceMouse working with the FreeCAD snap.
According to the instructions I should copy my ~/.Xauthority file, but I did not have that file...

After some investigation I understood that it should work without X11 permissions, instead using the UNIX domain socket /run/spnav.sock.

After some digging I come to the conclusion that I can get it to work by adding the /run/spnav.sock rw, to /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/snap.freecad.freecad. As I understands it /etc/spnavrc r, should also be added to get configuration management fully working.

I have no previous knowledge regarding snaps, so I have no clue how one could add that to the snap.

Hope this information might be helpful making the SpaceMouse just work for end users.

[ppd]

Wow, thanks for debugging this :)
I'll see what I can do later today.

[mattiasgronlund]

I realized that I had missed the "rw ," and r, ends of the lines so I updated the initial comment.

If you dig deeper into this it would be interesting to understand when/why most apps like X11... use abstract AF_UNIX sockets (@/var/run/spnav.sock) instead of the normal filesystem sockets.

I have local changes adding that abstract AF_UNIX support to both spnavd and libspnav, as I initially thought that could have been the problem.
That seems not to be needed, but I thought it could be good to know, as I do not understand when/why abstract vs path based AF_UNIX socket.

With abstract socket support, one can add unix (connect, send, receive) peer=(addr="@/var/run/spnav.sock"), and use that instead.

[ppd]

Observations:

• with libspnav 0.3, we can set SPNAV_SOCKET: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/libspnav/releases/tag/v0.3
• the flatpak solves this problem by passing through the socket: Update libspnav and pass along its socket flathub/org.freecadweb.FreeCAD#55. This is not possible for us without a new interface.

Options:

• Propose new interface in snapd
• Simply ship spacenavd in the snap itself as spacemouses present themselves as USB HID devices. This seems quite promising and also like the best UX. PR for testing incoming.

[luzpaz]

JFYI, libspnav current is v1.0

[basak]

Hi. Thank you for providing the FreeCAD snap! I am finding it very useful already.

I see there hasn't been any activity on this for a while, and just wanted to register that I'm another person who would find this issue being resolved very helpful.

Thanks again for your work!

[doucettom]

unix (connect, send, receive) peer=(addr="@/var/run/spnav.sock"),

Can you please tell me where in the file should I add this and do I have anything to do once done ? I'm trying this on realthunder's version w/o any success so far AppImages are working