Arch Linux

Convergence

Member

Registered: 2005-07-02

Posts: 377

Use Gnome15 Driver for Logitech G13

I've found 3 ways to use the Logitech G13 under linux.  The first two ways that I've found I got working, but were not ideal because they were either a pain to configure, or I had to use a weird mix of permissions in order to do so. 

Method 1: http://code.google.com/p/linux-g13-driver/ 
http://code.google.com/p/linux-g13-driver/  In some ways, this had the best results so far.  It had the nifty gui configuration tool, and it worked!  However, it was kind of a pain to configure because I would have to run the config tool with normal user permissions, then once things were configured, copy that configuration to /root, then run the driver with root permissions.  I would much rather have a kernel module that I don't have to run manually.  I don't think that it supports multiple configs either, (although at this point I can't remember for sure).   I may just end up using this if I can't get method 3 to work.

Method 2:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/g13/  (available in aur)
This method seems to have a lot of promise.  The developer even went out of his way to make it easy to develop a gui around this driver. It works, but it's a pain to configure.  At this point it involves piping commands to the device in /dev. It's also a userspace module. I verified that it does work, and moved on, because I found:

Method 3:  Gnome15    (available in aur)
This project provides both a kernel driver, and userspace driver.  It claims to support the g13 (amongst other logitech devices), provides a gui, multiple configs, has a daemon (I think), has multiple very nice plugins, etc.  The problem is that I can't get it working at all.  I can load the kernel module, start the desktop server, but I can't use or interact with my g13. 

I had to change permissions on /dev/uinput (which I haven't been able to figure out how to do persistently across boots.  My attempt at a udev rule doesn't appear to do anything) to get the desktop-service to run, verified that the hid_g13 module was loaded, and still it doesn't work.  running g15-config, selecting the device, then going to the "driver" tab shows "there is no appropriate driver for the logitech.... Do you have the appropriate driver installed?"  (I THINK I do!)  At one point, I think that I had both the userspace, and the kernel driver's installed at the same time.  I have lg4l-gnome15 installed, and at one point I had gnome15-driver-g15direct installed.  However, since I uninstalled it (because I thought it might be conflicting with the kernel driver) it seemed to have disappeared from aur.

lsmod | grep -i usb
usb_storage            47511  0 
usblp                  13010  0 
usbhid                 41820  2 hid_g13,hid_logitech_dj
hid                    87571  5 hid_generic,hid_g13,hid_gfb,usbhid,hid_logitech_dj
scsi_mod              132028  4 usb_storage,libata,sd_mod,sr_mod
usbcore               179715  8 usblp,usb_storage,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd,ehci_pci,hid_gfb,usbhid,xhci_hcd
usb_common               954  1 usbcore

Has anyone found success with gnome15 and the g13?  If not, has anyone found a way to make the other methods a little smoother?  Or, has anyone found yet another method?

PS: I've tried the gnome15 forums, and they seem to be badly neglected, and completely overrun with SPAM.
PPS: I use KDE, not Gnome.  But I don't think that's a factor really.
PPPS:  I'm mostly concerned with getting the buttons to work for gaming.  It would be nice to get the screen to display fancy stuff, or get my g13 to interface with mpd, but those are secondary to my main purpose: gaming.

Edit:
I just found this:  http://jpyth.com/?p=131  Which is clunky, but usable.  It's using method 2 mentioned above, but this guy pipes whole config files into /tmp/g13-0 (duh!)  makes it a lot more usable.  That way, I can have a whole directory of different configs, and just cat whatever profile I want to use at the moment to /tmp/g13-0.  I still need to use root permissions to do so, and it's not nearly as slick as gnome15 claims to be, but it'll do what I need it to do.

I'm not going to mark this as "solved", because it's not really.  I would still much rather use gnome15, and all of the bells and whistles that come with it.  If anyone has had success with it, please let me know.

Edit2: Changed the name of the thread.

Last edited by Convergence (2013-06-12 22:18:02)

---

It's a very deadly weapon to know what you're doing
---  William Murderface