Manual installation
Downloading
Clone Solaar from GitHub by git clone https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar.git
Requirements for Solaar
Installing Solaar from a repository should have set up all these requirements so in this situation you should be able to skip this section.
Solaar needs a reasonably new kernel with kernel modules hid-logitech-dj
and hid-logitech-hidpp
loaded.
Most of Solaar should work fine with any kernel more recent than 5.2,
but newer kernels might be needed for some devices to be correctly recognized and handled.
The udev
package must be installed and its daemon running.
Solaar requires Python 3.7+ and requires several packages to be installed.
If you are running the system version of Python you should have the
python3-pyudev
, python3-psutil
, python3-xlib
, python3-evdev
,
and python3-yaml
or python3-pyyaml
packages installed.
To run the GUI Solaar also requires Gtk3 and its GObject introspection bindings.
If you are running the system version of Python
the Debian/Ubuntu packages you should have
python3-gi
and gir1.2-gtk-3.0
installed.
in Fedora you need gtk3
and python3-gobject
.
You may have to install gcc
and the Python development package (python3-dev
or python3-devel
,
depending on your distribution).
If you are running a version of Python different from the system version, you may need to use pip to install projects that provide the above Python packages.
Solaar runs best under X11 with the Xtest extension enabled so that Solaar rules can fake keyboard input using Xtest.
Solaar also uses the X11 library to access the XKB extension,
which requires installation of the X11 development package.
(In Fedora this is libX11-devel
. In other distributions it may be libX11-dev
.)
Solaar will run under Wayland but some parts of Solaar rules will not work.
For more information see the rules page.
If desktop notifications bindings are also installed
(gir1.2-notify-0.7
for Debian/Ubuntu),
you will also see desktop notifications when devices come online/go offline.
For GNOME Shell/Budgie Desktop/KDE/XFCE support, you also need to have
gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1
installed in Debian/Ubuntu. Although it is
recommended to install and use gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1
if it is
available, you can also use gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1
if necessary (e.g.,
for Unity in Ubuntu).
Installing Solaar’s udev rule
Solaar needs to write to HID devices for receivers and devices. To be able to do this without running as root requires a udev rule that gives seated users write access to the HID devices for Logitech receiver and devices.
You can install this rule by copying, as root,
rules.d/42-logitech-unify-permissions.rules
from Solaar to
/etc/udev/rules.d
.
You will probably also have to tell udev to reload its rule via
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
.
For this rule to set up the correct permissions for your receivers and devices you will then need to either disconnect your receivers and any USB-connected or Bluetooth-connected devices and re-connect them or reboot your computer.
Running from the Download Directories
To run Solaar from the download directories, first install the Solaar udev rule if necessary.
Then cd to the solaar directory and run bin/solaar
for the GUI
or bin/solaar <command> <arguments>
for the CLI.
Do not run Solaar as root, you may encounter problems with X11 integration and with the system tray.
Installing Solaar Using Pip
Python programs are usually installed using pip.
The pip instructions for Solaar are in setup.py
, the standard place to put such instructions.
To install Solaar for yourself only run pip install --user .
from the solaar directory.
This tells pip to install into your .local
directory, but does not install Solaar’s udev rule.
(See above for installing the udev rule.)
Once the udev rule has been installed you can then run Solaar as ~/.local/bin/solaar
.
Installing python programs to system directories using pip is generally frowned on both
because this runs arbitrary code as root and because this can override existing python libraries
that other users or even the system depend on. If you want to install solaar to /usr/local run
sudo bash -c 'umask 022 ; pip install .'
in the solaar directory.
(The umask is needed so that the created files and directories can be read and executed by everyone.)
Then solaar can be run as /usr/local/bin/solaar.
You will also have to install the udev rule.
Solaar in other languages
If you want to have Solaar’s user messages in some other language you need to run
tools/po-compile.sh
to create the translation files before running or installing Solaar
and set the LANGUAGE environment variable appropriately when running Solaar.
Running Solaar at Startup
Distributions can cause Solaar can be run automatically at user login by installing a desktop file at
/etc/xdg/autostart/solaar.desktop
. An example of this file content can be seen in the repository at
share/autostart/solaar.desktop.
If you install Solaar yourself you may need to create or modify this file or install a startup file under your home directory.
Installing from PyPI
As an alternative to downloading and installing you can install the most recent release
(but not the current github version) of Solaar from PyPI.
Just run pip install --user solaar
.
This will not install the Solaar udev rule, which you will need to copy from
~/.local/share/solaar/udev-rules.d/42-logitech-unify-permissions.rules
to /etc/udev/rules.d
as root.