I recently became increasingly annoyed using the Touchpad portion of this wireless keyboard. Touchpads just are not as efficient as a real mouse. The touchpad is fine for very simple navigation but for doing anything that requires much traversing around the screen combined with much left and right-mouse button clicking is almost unusable. Maybe if this keyboard had real left and right mouse buttons, this wouldn’t be so bad.
I happened to have an orphaned Logitech receiver doing nothing in one of my many drawers of horded electronics. All I needed was a mouse to pair up with it. Since this one is one of those Logitech Unifying Receivers, all I needed was a Logitech mouse that was compatible with it. I went to my favorite place to buy used electronics, eBay, to get the cheapest thing I could find. I came upon a Logitech M185 Wireless Mouse which I ended up winning for $3.00, so a great deal.
Next, I had to pair this newly acquired mouse with my Unifying Receiver. To do so, I needed to install the Ltunify application.
Installation
Like nearly everything on openSUSE, installing software through the official, experimental or community repositories is easy to do. The easiest method is using the one-click installation from here:
https://software.opensuse.org/package/ltunify
Or if you prefer the terminal, which I happen to, you will have to add a repository then install the application.
Repository for Tumbleweed
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hardware/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ Hardware
Repository for Leap 15.1
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hardware/openSUSE_Leap_15.1/ Hardware
Repository for Leap 15.0
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hardware/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/ Hardware
Refresh all repositories
sudo zypper ref
Install the application
sudo zypper in ltunify
Application Usage
Once the application is installed, I just typed ltunify -h in the terminal to see the help and gain some understanding on how to use this.
# ltunify -h
Usage: ltunify [options] cmd [cmd options]
Logitech Unifying tool version
Copyright (C) 2013 Peter Wu <lekensteyn@gmail.com>Generic options:
-d, –device path Bypass detection, specify custom hidraw device.
-D Print debugging information
-h, –help Show this help messageCommands:
list – show all paired devices
pair [timeout] – Try to pair within “timeout” seconds (1 to 255,
default 0 which is an alias for 30s)
unpair idx – Unpair device
info idx – Show more detailed information for a device
receiver-info – Show information about the receiver
In the above lines, “idx” refers to the device number shown in the
first column of the list command (between 1 and 6). Alternatively, you
can use the following names (case-insensitive):
Keyboard Mouse Numpad Presenter Trackball Touchpad
From here I could see that this was going to be super simple. As root, I ran this
ltunify pair
Then turned the mouse on immediately. As soon as the mouse paired the terminal returned to the command prompt. To verify the mouse was paired, I ran the command
ltunify list
To which I was happy to see that the new mouse was now paired along with the broken mouse I once had.
Devices count: 2
Connected devices:
idx=1 Mouse Performance MX
idx=2 Mouse M185
To remove that device no longer being used, that is just as easy as pairing
ltunify unpair 1
Now my receiver is happily paired exclusively with the new mouse for my Kitchen Command Center Computer and I am no longer encumbered by a buttonless touchpad, navigating around a spreadsheet, document or anything of that nature.
Final Thoughts
Logitech is pretty awesome for having this Unifying Receiver device. It makes losing a dongle to a Logitech mouse or keyboard not such a big deal. It even frees up ports as you can have one receiver paired with 6 devices. That, in my opinion, makes Logitech devices more valuable than others and so long as they keep up with this convenient-for-the-user focus. They will keep my business.
Further Reading
ltunify from software.opensuse.org
Kitchen Command Center Computer: Dell Inspiron 20 3048 All-In-One Desktop
I recently got a Logitech K400 keyboard and was surprised how good it worked together with the tool solaar! And it even has a very good support for KDE with battery level display etc.
There is even a cli option available.
Try it. Great stuff!
That’s good to know. I will look into Solaar at some point.