Logitech Presenter R400 in Linux Mint

In general the Presenter R400 works fine, it’s immediately active after the USB receiver is plugged in and the keys representing Page Up/Down are working out of the box. Thus presentations in LibreOffice/OpenOffice, PDF Viewer (in my case Okular) and Google Docs are stepping forward and backwards using the main keys.

In contrast the smaller keys for jumping to presentation mode and disabling the display are sending codes, that the KDE desktop can’t process.

The solution in my setup (Linux Mint 16/Petra with KDE) is a change in the file /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb, which contains a section for Logitech Presenter R400:

# Logitech Presenter R400
keyboard:usb:v046DpC52Dd*dc*dsc*dp*ic*isc*ip*in00*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_070029=esc
 KEYBOARD_KEY_07003e=f5
 KEYBOARD_KEY_070037=b
#KEYBOARD_KEY_070029=presentation
#KEYBOARD_KEY_07003e=presentation
#KEYBOARD_KEY_070037=displaytoggle

To activate the changes without reboot, I used the following two commands to update and reload hwdb.bin before reconnecting the USB receiver:

udevadm hwdb --update
udevadm control --reload