Pair Logitech Unifying Receiver Devices In Linux With Solaar

The Logitech Unifying receiver supports connecting up to six compatible wireless mice and keyboards however, only the device that comes with the receiver is already paired (and thus, only that device will work out of the box with the receiver).

Logitech provides a tool for pairing additional devices to the Unifying receiver but it's only available for Windows and Mac OSX so if you want to pair new devices or if you want to use a new receiver (in case you lose the old one for instance) and you're using Linux, you can use a third-party tool such as Solaar.

Solaar is a Linux tool that allows you to manage Logitech Unifying Receiver mice and keyboards, that comes with both a GUI and command line interface.

The application can be used to pair / unpair Logitech devices to the Unifying receiver, it can display the battery status for most devices and, for some peripherals, it supports some extra settings that aren't available through the standard Linux system configuration:

• K750 Solar Keyboard: display the current lighting value (Lux);
• K360, MK700, K750 and K800 keyboards: toggle the FN key state;
• Performance MX Mouse: change the DPI;
• M705 Marathon Mouse and M510 Wireless Mouse: toggle smooth scrolling.

Solaar currently supports all Logitech Unifying Receiver devices but only some newer Nano Receivers are supported (USB ID: 046d:c52f, you can check that bu running "lsusb -d 046d:")

Install Solaar in Ubuntu

Solaar can be install in Ubuntu through its official PPA. To add the PPA and install Solaar, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:daniel.pavel/solaar
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install solaar

Once installed, open Solaar from the Dash / menu.

Important note: the first time I ran the application (GUI), it couldn't read the battery status for my Logitech M525 Wireless Mouse and I got a missing icon on the top panel. I've had to restart the application twice to get the panel (indicator) icon to show up and to get Solaar to display the battery status. So if you encounter this issue, try restarting the application.

In Ubuntu, all the Solaar files are installed under /opt so if you want to use the command line tool, run the following command:

/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/solaar/bin/solaar-cli --help

The command above should display all the available solaar-cli (the Solaar command line interface) options.

Solaar is also available for Debian 7 or higher, Gentoo, OpenSUSE and Arch Linux. The source code is available on GitHub.

via Fabián Rodríguez