I need to get a new wireless keyboard. I have to pair it with my Logitech unifying receiver. I built solaar. I see that it claims to support my receiver (046d:c534), keyboard (K270), and mouse (M185), but when I run solaar, it reports .

I have a logitech unifying receiver and a high end logitech mouse. I also believed that I needed solaar. I installed it in Mint 19.2 without even trying to use the mouse and receiver first. It work well. I did a fresh install of Mint 19.3 cinnamon and it turns out the Linux kernal 5.whatever does not need solaar. My mouse works just fine without it. And I can switch between all three computers. If you can upgrade your kernel to 5.0 it might be worth a shot.

If not why not call Logitech? Or post on their forum? You would do better there. I was cruising the zero responders list to see whom I could help. Since no one has responded to your post you might have better luck at Logitech.

I'm on 5.4.11.

I bought a keyboard & mouse combo years ago. I had to pair (I had Windoze back then.) That mouse still works, I'm buying only a new keyboard. Based on experience I anticipate needing to pair it. I don't see why a newer kernel will make a difference.


I pay 10¢ /minute to make a phone call.

Done, years ago.

Dumb question possibly. Did you turn the device on after or before inserting the nano receiver?

I picked up an old Logitech K520 keyboard at Goodwill (2 bucks. even came with fresh duracell bats) and used Solaar on Ubuntu (in repos) and i had to do a little dance with turning on and off the keyboard + plug unplug the receiver. It eventually worked but it was a bit of back and forth.

I think you only need it to pair. Solaar has nothing to do with normal usage as far as I can tell. My mouse and previous keyboard worked plug and play.

It was already on because I use the same mouse for three computers. Two Linux and one Windoze. It was already on when I did a clean install of Mint 19.3 and it worked immediately so I never bothered with Solaar.

There are no dumb questions!

Thank you, jmgibson1981, probably you saved a considerable amount of my time looking for a sophisticated solution ... :-)

You must turn the device off and back on to get it to pair. Many, if not most, Logitech devices will not pair with a unifying receiver. I have a newish Logitech K470 keyboard, and it won't pair with the unifying receiver that came with my MX Ergo trackball. Nor will the trackball pair with the receiver that came with the K470. I'm resigned to using two receivers. Solaar has not helped at all with that. The keyboard is recognized, but not compatible. Logitech has a compatibility problem that they apparently are not willing to fix.

afaict there are a few 'versions' of their receiver (I think more specifically its firmware, or at least you can 'see' this by differences in fw version) that makes this a problem (and note that they also don't have an interest in fixing security bugs/firmware flaws in the 'older' ones, but won't really document that either - they have silently allowed firmware blobs to make their way into fwupd though, so perhaps check on if there's an update available for your dongle - maybe it will help with compatibility) - in theory it should all work, but in practice it may not if you have devices that are relatively far apart in age. For example before it died, my Logitech unifying keyboard (I forget the model) worked fine with my MX Master's dongle (and vice versa), but those were bought at essentially the same time, while conversely the system with the MX Master's dongle doesn't even generally 'see' my newer HTPC's unifying keyboard/trackpad/all-in-one...

The 'turning it off and back on again' is also, unfortunately, reality for Solaar (and I believe this is the case if you go to the trouble of installing Windows to load their 1st-party application too) - I ended up leaving the dongle on a USB toggle so I could plug/re-plug it (and had to do this on most boot-ups even after 'everything was set up') if I wanted more advanced features from the software (e.g. DPI setting, battery monitoring, etc) - just a lot of hassle...