Hello all,
I've been looking for something like the Solar App for Linux for a while, and since it seems nobody has bothered to make one, I started making one myself.
The project is open source and available at https://github.com/pwr/Solaar . It's been developed using the little bit of documentation Logitech released on their HID protocol, a lot of intercepted USB traffic, and trial-and-error. Needless to say, it is highly experimental, and not supported by Logitech in any way.
Technically the application should support any of the Logitech devices that use the Unifying Receiver, but I only have a K750 keyboard and that's the only device I've been able to test it with.
If anyone decides to test it, please note that before running it you will have to perform a few steps, including some compilation and system configuration. So please read the README and INSTALL files carefully.
At https://github.com/pwr/Solaar/downloads you will find an archive of the application, with the necessary libraries pre-compiled for 64bit. I'm not sure it will work for anyone else since I've done the compilation on my machine (Debian sid), but you can give it a try. Don't forget to install the udev rules though, otherwise the Unifying Receiver won't be detected.
Any feedback and patches welcome 
.
Cheers,
-pwr
Thank you for testing the application, and the feedback .
The documentation is indeed currently somewhat lacking, I've mostly focused on the code so far. I'll expand the README with more detailed installation instructions, though any contribution would be more than welcome!
For deploying the application, theoretically you would not need to do anything specially. You could get the code from the Github page (https://github.com/pwr/Solaar), or download the archive and unpack it anywhere, and then just start the binaries form anywhere. Unless I've messed something up (which is quite possible), in which case the contents of the console output would help me fix the problem.
I've developed hidconsole mostly for testing communication with the receiver and checking request/reply traffic with the controller; only people developing on the application and debugging communication with devices would find it of any use.
The scan command is mostly to check if the application recognizes devices connected and can talk to them. I'd love to see a 'scan -v' output from your machine (-v it will also print traffic with the UR), since this would help me debug most problems in detecting devices and their capabilities.
The problems with Solaar are indeed strange. Could you start it with 'solaar -vv' for a full log, and send me the output?
Also, something I haven't documented yet: left-clicking the tray icon should show the application window, and right clicking it should show the context menu. You could also add '-S' to disable the systray icon, the application window should show up immediately and closing it should stop the application.
Possibly, there may be some dependency issues. I haven't built in any checking of dependencies and their versions yet, but probably I should do that. Just to make sure, I assume you're using the latest Solaar version (0.7.1), and have the right dependencies installed (libgtk3, python-pyudev, python-gi, gir1.2-gtk-3 -- the names of the packages might be different for your distro). Could you tell me what version of these packages you have?
If you have a Github account, I'd appreciate if you could create issues in the project, with each problem you encounter (and all the console output from the application). If not, just send me an email at daniel.pavel AT gmail DOT com with all the outputs. Btw, what distro do you use, and what version? I've developed on Debian unstable so far.
One more thing -- could you do test runs of 'solaar -vv' with both devices connected and then both devices turned off? The output would greatly help me in checking that the devices are identified correctly.
I've seen Julien's blog entry, actually it's what I used to start the development . I was just planning to contact him as well, but as there still seem to be issues, I'd rather fix them first.
Cheers,
-pwr
