mx5000tools

Control your Logitech MX 5000 keyboard

The Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 5000 Laser comes with a keyboard that has a nice LCD. But Logitech did not provide any way to control the LCD on a Free operating system. These tools make it possible to control what is displayed on the LCD and to use some of the keys that are not recognized by the stock Linux HID driver.

mx5000tools contains three parts:

• libmx5000: This library contains all of the code that directly interacts with the keyboard. Other applications can be implemented while using it. The only dependencies it has are a working libc, the Linux kernel and the netpbm library.
• mx5000-tool: This simple command-line tool allows users to control what is displayed on the LCD. It only depends on libmx5000.
• mx5000d: Some of the "special" keys on the MX 5000 are not properly handled by the HID driver present in the Linux 2.6.17 kernel (Update: as of 2.6.23, this seems to still be needed). This daemon listens for those events and emits corresponding events on a uinput event device (this requires the UINPUT driver in the kernel). It also translates the zoom scroller events into scroll wheel events. It depends on glib.

The latest version (0.1.2) can be downloaded at the Gna! download area. You can also access the current SVN tree. You can submit bugs on the tracker.

TODO

• Understand how to control the content of the menus
• Get from the kernel the events generated by some of the keys such as the a,b,c,d keys, the sync key, the im status key, the webcam key and the 4 keys below the LCD.
• Get information from Logitech about any other feature not exposed by SetPoint
• Add nice dbus/galago/etc powered features in mx5000d to have similar functionality to the windows Setpoint software.

I'd like to thank E. Heidstra for his work on mx5000lib for Microsoft .NET which was an inspiration for this program. And also for all the work he did reverse engineering most of the Logitech stuff.

The author of this program is Olivier Crête.