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Making The diNovo Edge Work On Ubuntu Lucid

The Logitech diNovo Edge is a pretty slick Bluetooth keyboard. It's thin, light, has months of battery life, and looks great too. It even works out of the box on Ubuntu Lucid. Well, almost.

I had trouble with it disconnecting. It would be fine for a day or so, but then not work some evening. Sometimes just the keyboard would stop and the touchpad would be fine. Other times it wouldn't work at all.

I had read that one of the great things about the keyboard is that it's capable of pairing with the dongle without any help from the OS. However, this only works if the dongle isn't initialized as a Bluetooth device. For example, in the BIOS screen, the keyboard works flawlessly. So, I set about preventing it from being initialized as a Bluetooth device.

There's a lot of bug reports and workarounds related to pairing problems, etc. and I didn't have success with any of the suggestions. Instead, I did something similar to this more recent suggestion and changed my udev rules. However, instead of making the suggested alteration to the Logitech device rule, I simply commented out the rule entirely. These are the lines of interest in /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules:
# Logitech devices
KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
  RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"
Now that my dongle is not initialized with hid2hci, I can bypass doing any Bluetooth configuration in Ubuntu whatsoever. Flawless victory.

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