I second that!
I have Spacenavigator quite some time, but I had use it only on my Windows laptop so far. Now I installed it to my Linux workstation and used Open Source driver (those linked above) from Ubuntu repository. The official one from 3DConnexion I've found, as many others, pretty useless by the way.
But now it works in Blender and still not in 3DC. Does anyone got it work under Ubuntu, please?