**Solaar** is a Linux device manager for Logitech's
[Unifying Receiver](http://www.logitech.com/en-us/66/6079) peripherals.

It comes in two flavors, command-line and GUI.  Both are able to list the
devices paired to a Unifying Receiver, show detailed info for each device, and
also pair/unpair supported devices with the receiver.

## Supported Devices

**Solaar** will detect all devices paired with your Unifying Receiver, and at
the very least display some basic information about them.  Depending on the
device, it may be able to read its battery status.

A few devices also have extended support, mostly because I was able to directly
test on them:

* The [K750 Solar Keyboard](http://www.logitech.com/keyboards/keyboard/devices/7454)
  is also queried for its solar charge status. Pressing the Solar key on the
  keyboard will pop-up the application window and display the current lighting
  value (Lux) as reported by the keyboard, similar to Logitech's *Solar.app* for
  Windows.

  Also, you can change the way the function keys (`F1`..`F12`) work, i.e.
  whether holding `FN` while pressing the function keys will generate the
  standard keycodes or the special function (yellow icons) keycodes.

* The [M705 Marathon Mouse](http://www.logitech.com/product/marathon-mouse-m705)
  supports turning on/off Smooth Scrolling (higher sensitivity on vertical
  scrolling with the wheel).

Extended support for other devices may be added in the future, depending on the
documentation available, but the K750 keyboard and M705 mouse are the only
devices I have and can test on right now.

## Requirements

You should have a reasonably new kernel (3.2+), with the `logitech-djreceiver`
driver enabled and loaded; also, the `udev` package must be installed and the
daemon running.  If you have a modern Linux distribution (2011+), you're most
likely good to go.

The command-line application (`bin/solaar-cli`) requires Python 2.7.3 or 3.2+
(either version should work), and the `python-pyudev`/`python3-pyudev` package.

The GUI application (`bin/solaar`) also requires Gtk3, and its GObject
Introspection bindings. The Debian/Ubuntu package names are
`python-gi`/`python3-gi` and `gir1.2-gtk-3.0`; if you're using another
distribution the required packages are most likely named something similar.
If the desktop notifications bindings are also installed (`gir1.2-notify-0.7`),
you will also get desktop notifications when devices come online/go offline.

## Installation

Normally USB devices are not accessible for r/w by regular users, so you will
need to do a one-time udev rule installation to allow access to the Logitech
Unifying Receiver.

You can run the `rules.d/install.sh` script from Solaar to do this installation
automatically (it will switch to root when necessary), or you can do all the
required steps by hand, as the root user:

1. copy `rules.d/99-logitech-unfiying-receiver.rules` from Solaar to
  `/etc/udev/rules.d/`

  By default, the rule makes the Unifying Receiver device available for r/w by
  all users belonging to the `plugdev` system group (standard Debian/Ubuntu
  group for pluggable devices). It may need changes, specific to your
  particular system's configuration. If in doubt, replacing `GROUP="plugdev"`
  with `GROUP="<your username>"` should just work.

2. run `udevadm control --reload-rules` to let the udev daemon know about the new
  rule
3. physically remove the Unifying Receiver, wait 10 seconds and re-insert it

## Known Issues

- When running under Ubuntu's Unity, the tray icon will probably not appear, nor
  will the application window.  Either run the application with the '-S' option,
  or whitelist "Solaar" into the systray. For details, see
  [How do I access and enable more icons to be in the system tray?](http://askubuntu.com/questions/30742/how-do-i-access-and-enable-more-icons-to-be-in-the-system-tray).

  Support for Unity's indicators is a planned feature.

- Running the command-line application (`bin/solaar-cli`) while the GUI
  application is also running *may* occasionally cause either of them to become
  confused about the state of the devices. I haven't encountered this often
  enough to be able to be able to diagnose it properly yet.

## Thanks

This project began as a third-hand clone of [Noah K. Tilton](https://github.com/noah)'s
logitech-solar-k750 project on GitHub (no longer available). It was developed
further thanks to the diggings in Logitech's HID++ protocol done by many other
people:

- [Julien Danjou](http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2012/logitech-k750-linux-support),
who also provided some internal
[Logitech documentation](http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2012/logitech-unifying-upower)
- [Lars-Dominik Braun](http://6xq.net/git/lars/lshidpp.git)
- [Alexander Hofbauer](http://derhofbauer.at/blog/blog/2012/08/28/logitech-performance-mx)
- [Clach04](http://bitbucket.org/clach04/logitech-unifying-receiver-tools)