Andreas Schuster

Andreas Schuster

Setting Up Logitech MK850 on Linux

Updated: 2 minute read

Background/Problem

A while back I bought a keyboard-mouse-combination from Logitech (keyboard: MK850; mouse: M720). The cool feature of this combination that made me buy it is the ability to use it on up to three different computers.

For one of these three computers you can just use the USB dongle that comes with it. All you got to do is plugging it in and you can use the mouse and the keyboard without any problems. To connect the keyboard and mouse to the next two computers (I’ve only tried one so far) you have to use bluetooth. While connecting the mouse via bluetooth was relatively simple, connecting the keyboard was not straightforward. That’s why I wanted to write down the necessary steps (for both,mouse and keyboard).

Solution

I used the following solution on Arch Linux [1] and Kubuntu [2]. I cannot remember what bluetooth packages were installed on Kubuntu, but on Arch the following packages were installed:

  • bluez
  • bluez-utils
  • blueman

Mouse

Connecting the M720 mouse using bluetooth was pretty easy.

  • Select the number you want to associate the computer with on the mouse (the number starts to blink fast).
  • Press the “device selection” button for three seconds or so.
  • Use the blueman-applet on the computer to connect to the mouse.
  • Done!

Keyboard

Since the MK850 keyboard connects with a pin code, the method used to connect the mouse to the computer didn’t work. Therefore I had to use the bluetoothctl tool that is part of the bluez-utils package.

The procedure was as follows:

  • In a terminal type, open the bluetoothctl tool:
bluetoothctl
  • After the tool has started type:
agent on
pairable on
  • Bring the keyboard into pairing mode, by pressing the device selection key with the number you want the computer to be associated with for three seconds or so. It starts blinking fast, once in pairing mode.
  • Find the MAC address of the keyboard. In order to do, so type:
scan on
  • The bluetoothctl tool will look for devices. Wait until you can see a line that identifies the keyboard, and stop the scan afterwards:
scan off
  • Pair your computer with the keyboard by typing:
pair [MAC-ADDRESS]
  • The bluetoothctl tool will output some lines of text. Somewhere should be a pin code, that has to be entered on the keyboard. Afterwards press enter on the keyboard and the bluetoothctl tool should print something like: “Pairing successful”.
  • Afterwards use the blueman-applet to “trust” the keyboard. It might also be possible to do that in the bluetoothctl tool by typing:
trust

And that should be it. On my Arch machine this didn’t work right away. Somehow on my first attempt, bluetoothctl didn’t show a pin key. After a reboot it worked. I don’t know why the first attempt failed.

Change Log

2022-09-19:

  • Changed wording a little bit.



Take care,
Andreas

References

  1. J. Vinet and A. Griffin, “Arch Linux.” [Online]. Available at: https://archlinux.org/. [Accessed: 28-Aug-2020].
  2. kubuntu.org, “Kubuntu | Friendly Computing.” [Online]. Available at: https://kubuntu.org/. [Accessed: 06-Sep-2020].

Updated:

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