X11 & Spaceball, No Alex there are other spaceball lovers too

[Alex Deucher]

On 4/6/07, Allen R. Lorenz <allenlorenz at charter.net> wrote:
> To all spaceball users...
>
> The history of the spaceball, and developer is quite easy find out about
> by googling..
>
> http://www.spatialfreedom.com/pages/content.asp?pid=1
>
> There are several models.  The most 2003a/b  are basically the same
> consisting of nine buttons.  8 on top with one on the ball.  You will
> usually find this listed from "Spaceball Technologies, or "A4360A" from
> Hewlett Packard (HP).  The 2003c model, I have only found released from
> IBM 6094-030. This model different from 2003a/b in it did not have a
> ninth button on the ball, and did not require an external power
> supply.
>
> The 3003 spaceball I have is from "Spacetec IMC".  I believe there is at
> least an hp version of this, and may ibm.  This model only has two
> buttons.
>
> The 4000 model has twelve button (1-9) and (a-c).  I believe there are a
> couple of version of this two.  While all previous models where serial
> port, I think this also had a early usb version.
>
> There is a 5000 model usb and 10s of variants....
>
> My fascination with spaceball began the tv show VR5, which the main
> heroine had one on here computer.  May years later I found them on ebay
> and bought several models.  Also my interest in Linux ( Redhat 7.2/8) at
> the time, cause be to dive guts of both the kernel drivers, and
> monolithic X at the time.... I also submitted several patches for to
> developers that I never heard back from.  If any would like copies of my
> old email/and patches go ahead and email me directly.  By modifying
> inputattach, and the spaceball driver  I was able to all models at that
> time ( 2003b, 2003c, 3003, 4000 ) to work under linux (jstest), and was
> able to get X and glut3.7 working to.  On my project list for this
> summer will be make sure they all work with the present X / flavor of
> glut...
>

If you would like to the the spaceball driver maintainer, let us know.
 We'd love to have you.  Part of the reason patches for some of the
more obscure drivers never get applied is that we have no maintainer
for them.

Alex