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Has anyone else noticed that Logitech holds a monopoly on wireless computer input devices? |
"Should have been easy." Boy, are those
dangerous words for a tech-in-training.
I got home and fired up my laptop, and before I started fiddling with anything I paid a visit to Good Ol'
Google. Figured I could get the procedure down beforehand, then breeze
through it and get to typing.
I was greeted with a
list of scripts, programs, and message boards. I visited the forum at AskUbuntu and quickly
learned that Logitech only
supports their Unifying
software for Windows and OS X, so Linux requires a workaround.
One option was booting into Windows, setting up the devices, then switching into Linux. Booting
into Windows was out of the question, so I looked for another solution.
Solaar sounded good, and it had a GUI, so I downloaded that and ran it. It
found my mouse instantly – but couldn't identify my keyboard.
Weird.
I
noticed that the screen read “nano receiver”. I looked that up,
and lo and behold – a nano receiver can only connect to one device
at a time. I tried to run other scripts from the terminal, to no
avail. I couldn't even trick the receiver into pairing with only the
keyboard. It knew the mouse, and wanted the mouse, and wouldn't be
friends with anyone else.
Now
I was stuck, because that was the only receiver I had, and clearly it
wasn't playing nice.
I gave up on the effort for a few days. Out of the blue my friend, who has easy access to a ton of electronic goodies, asked me to do a side data entry project for him. I agree, on condition that my payment is my favorite beer (Ninja vs. Unicorn Double IPA) and a Logitech receiver that will recognize my keyboard. He just happened to have an unused unifying receiver right at his desk. Score!
I gave up on the effort for a few days. Out of the blue my friend, who has easy access to a ton of electronic goodies, asked me to do a side data entry project for him. I agree, on condition that my payment is my favorite beer (Ninja vs. Unicorn Double IPA) and a Logitech receiver that will recognize my keyboard. He just happened to have an unused unifying receiver right at his desk. Score!
Excited to get this show on the road, I ran home and plugged in the unifying receiver and – nothing happened. It didn't
even recognize my mouse. I open Solaar – it found the keyboard,
threw a low battery warning, then got stuck in a “scanning”
stage. What the hell??? Fine, I'd just use the ltunify command. FAIL. Even
sudo couldn't get that one to work.
I
finally went back to my trusty Ask Ubuntu resource and tried the
autopair.sh script, an executable I downloaded last time I gave this
a try.
It
worked!!
In
comparison with the time it took to load Rails, this was a
fairly short and painless ordeal. I'm always up for a chance to play
around in terminal, anyway.
Thank
you, kind souls who wrote those scripts, and those who shared the
solutions in one easy to find place. I couldn't have done this
without you.
