Corsair K65 Keyboard & M65 Mouse in Mint

[eatenimpinia]

I just wanted to post my experience with my new Corsair K65 RGB Rapidfire keyboard and M65 Pro RGB mouse in Linux Mint 17.3. Roughly speaking, they work fine as a plain old ordinary keyboard and mouse. But, none of the special effects work. I'll have to give compiling the following software a shot to see if that will help:

https://github.com/ccMSC/ckb

The more detailed version is:

• Since the Corsair Utility Engine (CUE) only works in Windows, I had to initially install everything there and make sure the devices' firmware was updated. Once that was done, I booted back to Mint.
• The first thing I noticed was that the boot process now takes about 12 seconds longer before the password prompt comes up.
• Once up and running, the mouse logo stays lit with a solid yellow color, but nothing on the keyboard lights up except the LED on/off switch (which does nothing here) and the Windows Key lock button (which does function).
• The biggest functional problem is that the mouse scroll wheel scrolls much slower than did my old Logitech M705's. I can't find any way to change that in Mint. Looking around the internet, it looks like it's a problem with all flavors of Linux for all mice.
• I installed Chromium Wheel Smooth Scroller in Google Chrome to at least fix that in my browser. But, for other applications, I'm at a loss.
• It's not a Linux issue since the same thing happens in Windows, but according to the Corsair site, I should be able to plug the keyboard into either a single USB 3.0 port (using the "keyboard" connector) or two USB 2.0 ports. That's partially true. With a single USB 3.0, though, the mouse (being connected to the passthrough USB port on the keyboard) just doesn't work. So, it's two USB 2.0 ports for me.
• As to my opinion about these devices, I'm slightly surprised that, functionally, everything is ok. I didn't necessarily buy these for gaming. I wanted a smaller keyboard so I could keep my arms more centered and avoid hurting them. I had been worried about typing on the keyboard since its mechanical and the keys sit higher than on my Logitech K350. But, outside of some minor "getting used to" stuff, I type fine on it (and in Windows Steam games, it actually feels much nicer than the K350). The mouse seems to take a bit more force to click. That's not an issue at all for normal stuff. But, in a game, it gets tiring. I'm assuming that will ease a bit with use.

I'll add more to this as I go along. Especially if I can get that ckb software referenced above compiled and running.

EDIT: I've managed to successfully compile and run that ckb software to handle the keyboard/mouse lighting effects. I had to use the newdev branch to get it to recognize the hardware. But, other than that, I just followed the instructions:

• Change the branch to newdev and download it by clicking on the Clone Or Download button and selecting Download Zip.
• Make sure all the pre-requisites are installed via

  Code: Select all

  sudo apt-get install build-essential libudev-dev qt5-default zlib1g-dev libappindicator-dev

• Unzip that package, put it into your Home directory, browse into it, and double-click the quickinstall entry. Select the Run In Terminal option. Answer Yes to all the questions, then go to Start > Administration > ckb and choose your options.

[eatenimpinia]

Unfortunately, there seems to be problems when booting and shutting down. As noted in my OP, just having the devices plugged in adds about 12 seconds to the boot time before the password prompt comes up. Then, there's usually a delay of several seconds before the password prompt will accept keystrokes. Both of those are minor issues. There's also a sporadic delay in system shutdown of some number of seconds. Again, not to big of a problem. But, I'm now seeing an issue when the Desktop first loads of the mouse no longer being recognized (i.e., it was recognized up to when the password prompt appeared, but once the Desktop shows up, it no longer responds). I have to unplug the mouse from the keyboard's passthrough USB port to get it re-recognized, and even that can take a long time. There are a lot of entries in the SYSLOG about it not being able to find an interrupt endpoint and being disconnected, timing out initializing reports, failing with error -110. I'll see if I can find anything to fix this.

EDIT: So far, I can't find anything. The usual attempt is to add the product ID (in my case, the keyboard's is 0x1B39 and the mouse's is 0x1B2E) to the Kernel cmdline via a usbhid.quirks line. So, the line (assuming I need both keyboard and mouse in there) would look like:

Code: Select all

usbhid.quirks=0x1B1C:0x1B39:0x20000408,0x1B1C:0x1B2E:0x20000408

Unfortunately, everything I can find says that doesn't work (I still have to try it). The other thing mentioned is to make sure the firmware is up to date. Mine is. I'll continue looking.