When I got my Kova+ I had no intention of using it with Linux, but having recently installed SteamOS that has all changed...
I have managed to get roccat-tools installed and working, pretty damn impressive that someone has taken the time to make such a comprehensive bit of software. It all works great - that is, until I fire up a game in SteamOS, then for some reason the button assignments are no longer recognised.
The mouse still works as a "normal" 3 button mouse, but the additional buttons are unresponsive. Example - I assigned "arrow up" and "arrow down" to Easyshift mousewheel up and down in roccatkovaplusconfig. This works fine on the desktop, and also in the Steam interface, I can scroll through menus with no problem. However, starting up Metro 2033 or Monaco (my test games) I can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to select menu options, but the Easyshifted mouse wheel does nothing.
I thought this might just be a quirk of SteamOS, so I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.10, installed roccat-tools, Steam and Monaco, sure enough exactly the same thing happened.
So, my Kova+ gaming mouse works great in Linux/SteamOS, except for playing actual games! I would like to know if anyone else has got a Kova+ to work with SteamOS or Steam on Linux, and if so, how you did it... or is the Kova+ simply not going to work in this situation?
Thanks in advance for any help or ideas,
Bartman12345
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Looks like you are compiling roccat-tools yourself. Would you like to test a small patch that makes Kova[+] use uinput instead of it's own keyboard endpoint?
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Anonymous
Anonymous
-
2015-04-09
Thanks for replying, I didn't compile roccat-tools on SteamOS or Ubuntu, I was able to add the appropriate Ubuntu repositories and install using apt-get on SteamOS, and on Ubuntu I added the required ppa and got it installed that way.
However, on my initial test run with roccat-tools on an old Ubuntu laptop, I did compile from source... it was a bit tricky, but after getting all the dependencies sorted out it worked fine.
Anyway, in answer to your question I would certainly like to try this patch. SteamOS would be much more useful to me if I could use my Kova+ with it... if you can let me know where I can get it from I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.
Thanks,
Bartman12345
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Did some investigation on this. What causes so much problems is called "Raw input" and takes input devices back to stone age.
Keyboard macros issued from non-keyboards will not work, only the first 3 mousebuttons are registered...
This issue is the same under Windows and beyond the scope of this project. I'll keep this in mind though but everything I can think of atm are dirty hacks.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
With the newest releases libgaminggear-0.10.1 and roccat-tools-3.5.0 software macros/shortcuts and multimedia events use uhid instead of uinput where available. This at least fixes some things regarding raw input and Wine.
Please read libgaminggears INSTALL instructions on how to set up uhid access for normal users.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
When I got my Kova+ I had no intention of using it with Linux, but having recently installed SteamOS that has all changed...
I have managed to get roccat-tools installed and working, pretty damn impressive that someone has taken the time to make such a comprehensive bit of software. It all works great - that is, until I fire up a game in SteamOS, then for some reason the button assignments are no longer recognised.
The mouse still works as a "normal" 3 button mouse, but the additional buttons are unresponsive. Example - I assigned "arrow up" and "arrow down" to Easyshift mousewheel up and down in roccatkovaplusconfig. This works fine on the desktop, and also in the Steam interface, I can scroll through menus with no problem. However, starting up Metro 2033 or Monaco (my test games) I can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to select menu options, but the Easyshifted mouse wheel does nothing.
I thought this might just be a quirk of SteamOS, so I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.10, installed roccat-tools, Steam and Monaco, sure enough exactly the same thing happened.
So, my Kova+ gaming mouse works great in Linux/SteamOS, except for playing actual games! I would like to know if anyone else has got a Kova+ to work with SteamOS or Steam on Linux, and if so, how you did it... or is the Kova+ simply not going to work in this situation?
Thanks in advance for any help or ideas,
Bartman12345
Looks like you are compiling roccat-tools yourself. Would you like to test a small patch that makes Kova[+] use uinput instead of it's own keyboard endpoint?
Thanks for replying, I didn't compile roccat-tools on SteamOS or Ubuntu, I was able to add the appropriate Ubuntu repositories and install using apt-get on SteamOS, and on Ubuntu I added the required ppa and got it installed that way.
However, on my initial test run with roccat-tools on an old Ubuntu laptop, I did compile from source... it was a bit tricky, but after getting all the dependencies sorted out it worked fine.
Anyway, in answer to your question I would certainly like to try this patch. SteamOS would be much more useful to me if I could use my Kova+ with it... if you can let me know where I can get it from I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.
Thanks,
Bartman12345
Did some investigation on this. What causes so much problems is called "Raw input" and takes input devices back to stone age.
Keyboard macros issued from non-keyboards will not work, only the first 3 mousebuttons are registered...
This issue is the same under Windows and beyond the scope of this project. I'll keep this in mind though but everything I can think of atm are dirty hacks.
With the newest releases libgaminggear-0.10.1 and roccat-tools-3.5.0 software macros/shortcuts and multimedia events use uhid instead of uinput where available. This at least fixes some things regarding raw input and Wine.
Please read libgaminggears INSTALL instructions on how to set up uhid access for normal users.