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Best way to work with USB devices that only have Windows software/drivers? (hilariouschaos.com)

submitted 1 month ago by NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

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I have at least two devices I can’t use/update since ditching Windows and moving to Linux and macOS.

I have a water cooler on my Bazzite gaming PC that has an LCD. It was pretty cool because it displayed content on this screen like temps and cool graphics. I got the program running just fine using Proton and Wine, but it won’t properly discover the device in their proprietary software. The LCD screen is connected to one of my motherboard’s USB ports (not an actual USB port, but the one you plug front IOs into).

Same is true for a keyboard I have. It has a cool LCD for displaying gifs and this comes by software the keyboard uses. It can also update the firmware of the keyboard, when updates are available. I got the software running just fine on both Linux and macOS using Proton and Wine, but, same issue as before, the software once installed doesn’t find the USB keyboard.

Neither of these have software/drivers made or available for Linux or macOS.

I’ve played around with winecfg and device configurations in here and not found a way to get the devices to show up there.

Is there any way to get USB devices to work with software like this?

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I got the software running just fine on both Linux and macOS using Proton and Wine, but, same issue as before, the software once installed doesn’t find the USB keyboard.

It feels like the USB HID device (your keyboard) is being unbound from either the operating system or from the HID profile when you get the software running. Its also possible that part of the nature of the vendor software actually decouples the keyboard HID profile and substitutes some vendor proprietary communication method which isn't USB HID.

Prior to having the software running under Wine, does your keyboard show up with 'lsusb' ?

After you have the software running under Wine, what shows up with 'lsusb'?

[–] NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 1 month ago

This is a good point I never considered, thank you. I’m going to check into this and see when I get back later today.

At first I had the keyboard connected directly to the computer but now I use a KVM. I’ll check when connected over KVM and directly and report back what lsusb shows.