Arch Linux

Valheru

Member

Registered: 2005-02-06

Posts: 49

A present for all you Logitech G15/MX Revolution owners

I just bought a Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard and a Logitech Revolution MX mouse, and straight away ran into the problem most peripheral users in Linux encounter: the stuff works, but the manufacturer refuses to make software for anything but Windows so you can't access the advanced functions. Stupid bastards.
Right after that I found out that some enterprising people had writting g15tools ( http://g15tools.sourceforge.net/ ) which gives access to the functions to control the G11/G15. Also, some kind person had spent countess hours finding out the hardware codes that made the MX tick ( http://goron.de/~froese/ ).

Unfortunately, several things bugged me. One was that lack of a cohesive software package that brought all the funtionality together, like the Logitech stuff under Windows. Secondly, what always bugs me about this sort of software is that it's always made to be run via the command line. Not that that in itself is bad, I do virtually everything there myself. But I do feel it kind of defeats the purpose, since you're using the peripherals because they are spiffy and I myself would rather have some nice software to go with it. I suspect that the authors also feel most of the time that they've put in enough effort writing the libraries without having to monkey around with GUI's

The g15daemon provided to access the keyboards advanced keys was bugged, and when I opened up the code to hack it (it wouldn't turn off the lights of my keyboard when shutting down the computer ) I saw that it didn't leave much room to cleanly extend the code for communicating with a GUI. I am principally against desktop applications communicating via TCP sockets when all that effort has been put into DBUS for a reason, so I wrote a daemon and a GUI client of my own over the weekend.

you can find it here : http://www.qt-apps.org/content/show.php … tent=69194

Right now the code is very minimal, since I had to learn how to use DBUS and Glib AND write custom CMake macros all at once >_< It was a bit of a headache, and as you can read over at the projects homepage I now officially hate glib You can compile the daemon with the cmake option -DCOMPILE_C_VERSION=1 for the C daemon, which will probably be the code that I am going to develop from here on out, or if that doesn't work for you for some reason use -DCOMPILE_C_VERSION=1

The client is in Qt4, and will probably be ported to KDE4 soon. I will have to see about porting it to KDE3 - I'm not sure you can mix KDE3 and Qt4 code. I might write a GTK client at some point in the future, but I wouldn't hold your breath for it. I'd actually prefer it if someone would write one so that I don't have to do it

Bear in mind that you can't actually do anything besides changing the level of the brightness of the LCD screen and the keyboard lights. I still have to write the code for the Macro keys and integrate the Revoco code to control the mouse. But if all goes well I should have that done in a month or so, depending on how busy school is - I have exams ATM But with a bit of luck we will have a software package on par with the Logitech Windows one in the end...

Valheru

Member

Registered: 2005-02-06

Posts: 49

Re: A present for all you Logitech G15/MX Revolution owners

I have made some PKGBUILDs, you can get them from the AUR. They will require you to grab some other packages from the AUR - namely all the g15tools ones.

logitechapplet
logitechdaemon

Roberth

Member

From: The Pale Blue Dot

Registered: 2007-01-12

Posts: 894

Re: A present for all you Logitech G15/MX Revolution owners

Would be great to seen a plain gtk+ frontend.

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Use the Source, Luke!

Valheru

Member

Registered: 2005-02-06

Posts: 49

Re: A present for all you Logitech G15/MX Revolution owners

Would be great to seen a plain gtk+ frontend.

Write one then. The documentation will be up soon, but the source is so simple you can understand it easily. All you need to do is use the logitechdaemon.xml DBUS introspection file to generate the bindings with dbus-bindings-tool to generate the C header file with the bindings and then implement the functions declared in it.

Valheru

Member

Registered: 2005-02-06

Posts: 49

Re: A present for all you Logitech G15/MX Revolution owners

To those who had problems compiling the source - I had messed up with the depends, it was dependent upon libg15render, not libg15. The packages on AUR are fixed. I also made packages for the actual SVN code as well, they are also up now.

Logitech Applet SVN

Logitech Daemon SVN