Logitech Gaming Keyboards

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Reason: Many style issues. (Discuss in Talk:Logitech Gaming Keyboards)

Some Logitech Gaming Keyboards can work on Linux through Unofficial drivers. There are a few packages available

Install

g15daemonAUR and its dependencies are available in the Arch User Repository (AUR). G15daemon drivers still work for the keyboards they supported, but their development was mostly dropped in 2008, the source is still available for anyone to pick up and continue their development, there are a few bugs in them that were never solved. These drivers use the g15macroAUR to interact with the G keys. There is also a g15statsAUR plugin to show system information on the LCD display.

sidewinderdAUR

hid-lg-g710-plus-dkms-gitAUR

keyledsAUR is available through Arch User Repository. Detailed configuration, effects and LUA scripting are in the project's documentation.

Supported Models

g15daemon supports:

  • G15 (Orange and Blue)
  • G11
  • Gamepad
  • G510 (Requires Patching; Read below)

Gnome15 has a list of supported devices on its front page. The keyboards are:

  • G19
  • G19s
  • G15 (Orange and Blue)
  • G13
  • G110
  • G510 and G510s (Partial)

sidewinderdAUR supports:

  • G710 / G710+
  • G105
  • (and Microsoft SideWinder X4 / X6, hence name)

hid-lg-g710-plus-dkms-gitAUR supports:

  • Logitech G710 / G710+

g810-led-gitAUR led supports:

  • G213
  • G410
  • G413
  • G512
  • G513
  • G610
  • G810
  • G815
  • G910
  • GPRO

keyledsAUR led supports (possible lua scripting):

  • G410
  • G610
  • G810
  • G910
  • GPro

G510 on g15daemon

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Reason: Needs to be updated to use Arch Build System/asp (Discuss in Talk:Logitech Gaming Keyboards)

Forum Thread (This thread has more detailed instructions and might be helpful for readers from other distributions or less advanced users, it also contains a list of known issues.)

Note: This has not been tested with the G510s, if you want to try then find line 23 and 24 in the libg15.patch linked below and replace the device ID with the appropriate values for G510s which can be found with lsusb command from the usbutils package

A patch was written to make the G510 keyboard fully compatible with the g15daemon drivers. It is however not compatible with g15macro and as such an alternative approach was needed (which involved heavy modifications of the original code) the result yields much better performance for than using the gnome15 drivers which can currently result in severe input lag for this keyboard.

To apply the patch you must download the g15daemon and libg15 sources with asp and edit their PKGBUILDs.

Note: I would recommend that you instead follow the forum thread linked to at the start of this section, it is a lot easier. (And it does not require ABS)

To download the sources to a folder directory called "community" (the folder will be dropped into whichever directory the terminal is in) run the two following commands:

ABSROOT=. abs community/g15daemon
ABSROOT=. abs community/libg15

Now enter the folders and fetch the sources for them. (Make sure to remember to download the soures for both of them)

makepkg -S

The patch already applies the patches from the arch community repository, so remove all patches that came with g15daemon by running:

rm community/g15daemon/*.patch

Then download the libg15 and g15daemon patches and modify to your will. The color profiles per M-Led settings are hard coded into the libg15 patch at line 341, 344, 347 and 350 in R,G,B color code.

Then place the files (libg15.patch and g15daemon.patch) into the folders that your packages were downloaded into, after this you must replace the PKGBUILDS with the new ones: g15daemon, libg15 These new PKGBUILDS refer to local sources only, this means they do not fetch sources from the net if they are not present so make sure you hold on to your tar.bz2 files. If you want them to fetch these from the net you can refer to the original PKGBUILDs.

Now install the packages, libg15 comes first, libg15renderAUR is required as well before you install g15daemon.

makepkg -fic

This will compile, install and clean up the extracted sources afterwards to avoid cluttering the folder. I also recommend installing g15statsAUR from AUR next. For fluff.

After the installation you need to create the macro script files, and place them into /usr/share/g15daemon/macros. If you want to create them yourself the files need to be executable and the filenames are corresponding to the label on each key (so for the G1 key use /usr/share/g15daemon/macros/G1). Normally these files should use the bash script syntax.

Note: You will need to have sudo installed and configure it so that g15daemon can be run without a password. The sleep command is to give g15daemon time to launch before g15stats is loaded into it

For commands on the G keys to work with graphical applications g15daemon must be started after the X11 session. To do this you must add these commands to your autostart/xinitrc.

sudo g15daemon && sleep 3 && g15stats

And congratulations! you have a working G510 keyboard on Linux :) With a few issues of course (known issues are in the forum thread linked to at the start of this section)