Portable Drivers

Questions and answers about 3Dconnexion devices on Windows.

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thefatninja
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Portable Drivers

Post by thefatninja »

I teach at Ferris State University and have been recomending Space Travelers to my students. The problem is that the computers do not have the drivers installed (we get once a year ghosts) and the students do not have administration rights. Is there a way to run the software and drivers from a portable drive?
jwick
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Post by jwick »

I don't think we've ever tried it, but it might be possible. The problem may be with the registry. There are some entries that are expected to be in HKLM. Students won't have write access to those entries.

The best option is to ghost and distribute a machine with 3DxWare installed. Of course, the automatic updates won't work.

Our next release will place most everything in HKCU, but still expects the HomeDirectory of the driver to be placed in HKLM. This release should be out in a few weeks.

If you want to try this, try moving the driver, and change the Home Directory entry in HKLM/software/3dconnexion/3dxware to the new location.

Please post your results here and maybe we can make this work for you.

Jim
3Dx Software Development
thefatninja
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Post by thefatninja »

I appreciate the quick responce. I will try and work with our tech support to run a test, but my guess is that they will not be too excited about helping since they are stretched very thin.

I personally do not know HKLM from HKCU - I teach 3D and do not get into the really technical side of systems.

In the mean time, if you think of any other solutions please let me know. I am very excited about your proudcts and could see easily 25-40 purchaces a symester without trying too hard.
jwick
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Post by jwick »

We'd be thrilled to have more students using our devices. Note that we have special pricing for students and now have a $59 device specifically targeted at students. The $59 SpaceNavigator is a little bigger, heavier than the SpaceTraveler, but it works with all the same applications. It only has two buttons.

I've made changes to the version of the driver that will start QA tomorrow to accommodate your students' situation. It will take some manual copying around, but it will work. No previous versions would have worked at all. This release should hit the web in a few weeks as 3DxSoftware 3.1.x.

Jim
3Dx Software Development
don76249
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Joined: Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:19 pm

Post by don76249 »

I am in the same predicament. The IT person at my school failed to include the 3DCONNECTION drivers in this semesters build,,,, again!
Going back and forth between having my 3D mouse and not having is is throwing one big monkey wrench into my work-flow.

Being able to run my SpaceNavigator off of a dedicated flash/thumb drive would be a god send.

Thanks in advance
Don
dpaint
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Re: Portable Drivers

Post by dpaint »

Bump

I second this opinion, I have the same situation again and again with my Spacemouse (wired) when travelling, non-root non-admin users need to plug and play with their devices or at least have a workaround that would load the bare minimum driver via script.

I was considering the new wireless kit, but the marketing blurb about being Mobile does not line up with the need to have portable drivers and easily transferrable cross-platform (xml) config files between your workstation and laptop or whatever machine you're dumped in front of. (yeah I know a 'pro' wouldn't work without the correct setup and rider, but in the real world I haven't seen this happen, ever. EVER.

https://www.3dconnexion.eu/spacemouse_wireless_kit/eu/

When I get enough posts here I'll stick the same request in the OSX forum to see if a portable setup is possible, there might be a way to use aliases with some of the mac setups I've used but Im not very hopeful.
hrayner
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Re: Portable Drivers

Post by hrayner »

I'm a student who got a space mouse for a summer internship and I really don't want to go back to CAD without it. Has anyone figure out how to get this to work on computers where we don't have permission to install drivers?

I'm happy to show it off to other students and tell them how cool it is, but only if I'm successfully using it at school!

Thanks!
jwick
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Re: Portable Drivers

Post by jwick »

I don't think anyone has looked at this in a few years.

The driver is just a collection of files.
Some get put into system directories but those may be able to be worked around.

A few years ago I made some changes to release some of the registry restrictions.
Probably the GUI is not going to work correctly as it stands today.

I made a feature request to look into this further (WIN-442).
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