Manual installation

Downloading

Clone solaar from GitHub via git clone https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar.git

Requirements for running 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 (5.0+ should work fine), with kernel modules hid-logitech-dj and hid-logitech-hidpp loaded. Also, the udev package must be installed and its daemon running. If you have a recent Linux distribution, you are most likely good to go.

Solaar requires Python 3.2+ and the python3-pyudev package. To run the GUI, solaar also requires Gtk3, and its GObject introspection bindings. The Debian/Ubuntu packages that need to be installed are python3-gi and gir1.2-gtk-3.0; in Fedora you need gtk3 and python3-gobject; 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 for Debian/Ubuntu), you will also get 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 the receiver’s HID device. To be able to do this without running as root requires udev rule that gives seated users write access to the HID devices for Logitech receivers.

You can install this rule by copying, as root, rules.d/42-logitech-unify-permissions.rules from Solaar to /etc/udev/rules.d. The udev daemon will automatically pick up this file using inotify.

For this rule to set up the correct permissions for your receiver you will then need to either physically remove the receiver and re-insert it or reboot your computer.

Running from the Download Directories

If Solaar’s udev rule is installed, you can just go to the solaar directory and run bin/solaar for the GUI or bin/solaar <command> <arguments> for the CLI.

Otherwise you will need to run Solaar as root via sudo bin/solaar for the GUI or sudo bin/solaar <command> <arguments> for the CLI.

Installing Solaar

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.) You can then run solaar as sudo ~/.local/bin/solaar (or just ~/.local/bin/solaar if the udev rule has been installed).

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.) This will also install the udev rule and the Solaar autostart desktop file. Then solaar can be run as /usr/local/bin/solaar.

Running Solaar at Startup

Solaar is run automatically at user login via the desktop file /etc/xdg/autostart/solaar.desktop.

If you install Solaar yourself you may need to create or modify this file.

Using 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 or sudo pip install solaar. The --user flag will not install the Solaar udev rule or the Solaar autostart file.