Tag: Logitech

Getting Mousey with the Logitech MX5000, MX1000 mouse, Ubuntu, Evdev and some Extra Mouse Buttons

As I get more and more stuck into getting Ubuntu to work nicely for me – I find myself more and more determined to resolve the little issues that nag me.

Today, I decided to finally get the extended mouse support for my Logitech MX5000 desktop working, and thankfully the process wasn’t too fraught with Bad Stuff Happening(TM).

So, after a quick google, I found that Mat Van Stone has very recently tried the same thing, which has made my life a great deal easier. Also a post from the Ubuntu forum assists in the expanding of the functionality.

I haven’t got into Section 2 of the guide yet, but I’ll be trying that out soon. In the meantime, I have used Beryl Settings Manager to configure the task switch button to run the Scale function, which is how I used it in Windows XP with TopDesk (the Expose for Windows prog).

What’s nice is I use ALT+the task switch button to Scale windows on all desktops, and the button alone for the current desktop.

It’s reasons like this I’m liking using Linux more and more.

Trying to get the Logitech Bluetooth MX5000 Dongle to start with Ubuntu

Although reconnecting the bluetooth USB dongle is a good workaround for Ubuntu, it is starting to get a tad annoying.

On the Ubuntu forums, it is apparently just since the Edgy release that this occurs. There is a workaround by removing the bluez packages – although the side effect is that you cannot add other bluetooth devices.

As it happens, I’m not a huge fan of bluetooth devices anyway, so I’ll give this a shot.

Logitech USB Headset and Linux

I’ve been having a battle with my Logitech USB headset over the last couple of days. If there’s on thing I liked in Windows a great deal, that was the simplicity of the USB headset.

If I plug it in, all the sound would be defaulted to the headset. When unplugged, the sound would go back to the sound card. It was beautiful.

Linux, on the other hand, wouldn’t play like that. SUSE’s YaST doesn’t like the USB headset. It knows that something is there. It even knows that there is some sort of sound device there. But it doesn’t recognise it. Neither does it want to know.

I was having all sorts of grief the thing. In fact I couldn’t tell whether it was working or not half the time.

I hit the Novell SUSE Hardware forums and posted a request, and received the following advice:

As far as I understood the wrong driver gets selected during boot.

add “audio” to “/etc/hotplug/blacklist”, plug in the headset and then
reboot. /proc/asound/cards should show something like “USB-Audio – C-Media
USB Headphone Set”

alternatively edit /etc/modprobe.conf (or modprobe.conf.local):
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
options snd-intel8x0 index=0
options snd-usb-audio index=1

After rebooting the USB Headset didn’t seem to appear in YaST again. However, KMIX and QAMix both recognised the new hardware device.

After switching off ‘mute’ for the headset mic (which is enabled by default), everything seems to work.

The only catch is that I have to have the headset plugged in when I start Linux, and I can’t reconnect it during a session. B’ah!

The good part is that Skype works a treat now.