Logitech G9x Laser Mouse

I got lucky enough to have received a G9x Laser Mouse as a gift recently. Up until this day, I’ve always used whatever mouse came with the computer and never had come to a thought of using otherwise. Being presented with a more advanced mouse, I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying it.

Logitech defines the G9 as a ‘gaming mouse’. I’m not sure this is a ‘game mouse’, the G9 seems to apply more to the advanced user, but.. ehhh. It has seven mouse buttons, DPI switching, built-in memory for profiles, and an optional grip. The seven mouse buttons are: left-click, right-click, middle-click on scroll-wheel, left-scroll, right-scroll, forward and backward buttons (for use in browsers). The G9 includes a nice, big, fat scroll wheel that has a switch to change from the expected click-scrolling to hyper-scrolling. Hyper-scrolling is a blast. It’s like spinning a Lazy-Susan and just watching it go :).

All settings are hardware-based and get saved to the G9′s built-in memory so there is no need to copy the Window’s settings. The memory is capable of five different profiles that can be customized for gaming, graphic design… The G9 is customizable through Logitech’s Setpoint software which unfortunately isn’t available for Linux. I tried to run the Setpoint installer through Wine on Linux but was unable to. I had to resort to configuring the G9 with my Windows install. With Setpoint a good number of settings can be adjusted: buttons, scroll-speed, mouse speed/acceleration, profiles, LED color… However, some settings are dependent on Windows (mouse acceleration, DPI association with program…), but a good number of them work in both Linux and Windows.

The G9 is a great fit in the hand and I like how it is wider than typical mouses. The buttons have nice touches to them, and I like the weights you can add that make the mouse a bit heavier. The scroll wheel works nice for scrolling though it is a bit loose. This creates a small vibration when scrolling and a bit of loose space from left to right. The buttons of the scroll wheel are the blind spot of the G9 – all three buttons on the scroll wheel are a bit rigid. Mouse button three isn’t too difficult, but doing scroll left makes you move your finger to the edge and push pretty good. I also found that hyper-scrolling wasnt’ real useful. The wheel spins almost freely and I found it’s difficult to go through text in this wheel mode and be able to keep text steady.

Liking this mouse quite a bit, if just feels good. It has a comfortable design, good fit, slides well, good cord length. It also works good in Linux. On my Arch Linux install, most functions worked without any additional configuration. The only bit that doesn’t work is the scroll-left and scroll-right which I have yet to find out how to do. Update: Discovered how to remap the keys here… alls golden. Note that previous versions of the G9 may have the buttons mapped slightly different.

Overall, very glad I got this mouse.

Random Color Changing Script

The “running man” LED color on the mouse can be changed in Linux with a nice program called g9led (couple packages available below). g9led will need root privileges likely if you want to run it easily (i.e. not have to type a password everytime). See this post on how to easily do that. g9led is also not able to store the color into the mouse so you’ll have to set it manually on every reboot. However, I created this script will set a random color when it is run and then will do so again after the defined interval.

#!/bin/bash
# Change Logitech G9 mouse led color to random color after specified period

# Minutes until change
minutes=10
MINUTES=$(($minutes*60))
# Generic array of colors
color=(000033 000066 000099 003300 006600 00CC00 00FF33 330000 330033 330066 
333300 336600 33CC33 33FF00 33FF33 660000 660033 6600CC 6600FF 66FF00 66FF33
99FF00 99FF33 CC3300 CCCC00 CCFF00 CCFF33 FF0000 FF0033 FF0066 FF0099 FF3300
FF3333 FF6600 FF6633 FFFF00)

# Run g9led and insert random color every $minutes
while true; do
  sudo g9led ${color[$((RANDOM %= $((${#color[@]}))))]}
  sleep "$MINUTES"
done

To have it load at boot create a .desktop in the home autostart directory:

echo '[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=Logitech G9 Mouse LED Random Color Changer
Comment=Change G9 mouse color as specific intervals
Exec=<PATH-TO-SCRIPT-DIR>/g9led-random-color
Icon=mouse
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true' > ~/.config/autostart/g9led-random-color.desktop

The script will fail to run properly after resuming from sleep and will need to be stopped and restarted again. This can be done by doing this:

sudo sh -c 'echo "#!/bin/sh
# Kill original g9led-random-color loop, run again

case \"\$1\" in
  resume | thaw )
    killall -9 g9led-random-color
    export DISPLAY=:0
    su -c - todd <PATH-TO-SCRIPT-DIR>/g9led-random-color &
    ;;
esac" > /etc/pm/sleep.d/95_g9led-random-color'

And by doing that… ready to go.

• g9led for Debian-based users
• g9led for Arch users