News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on My mouse driver is asking for a firewall exemption (2019). Parent comment

Re:My mouse driver is asking for a firewall exemption (2019) by aidenn0 on Monday August 23, 2021 @12:12PM (#28278109)
So I am a membr of the trackballs subreddit. I run almost exclusively linux so I don't run into this issue, but two of the popular brands for trackballs are Logitech and Elecom. Elecom's software is far worse than Logitechs (also their firmware only vaguely respects the USB HID spec, so none of the extra buttons work with a generic HID driver).

There are dozens of threads asking about how to use logitech and elecom trackballs on Macs and they all end up with "Well, I finally got steermouse and all my problems have gone away"

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:My mouse driver is asking for a firewall exemption (2019) by progbits on Monday August 23, 2021 @01:38PM (#28279330)
Funny how the manufacturer does such a bad job there is money to be made in shipping an actually functioning driver...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:My mouse driver is asking for a firewall exemption (2019) by aidenn0 on Monday August 23, 2021 @02:03PM (#28279676)
Elecom doesn't even try with their firmware. They send an identical HID descriptor regardless of what the device actually supports (x +y scrollwheel, 5 other buttons). Here's the linux workaround:

https://code.woboq.org/linux/linux/drivers/hid/hid-elecom.c....

If you use a recent Elecom device and an LTS linux kernel you need to patch your kernel just to get the buttons working right!

[ Parent | on HN ]