Is the Dell Universal Pairing USB receiver supported?
Dell sells wireless keyboards and mice that use a Dell Universal Pairing system.
Does this work out of the box in Ubuntu?
Solution 1:
May I suggest a workaround?
I ran into this problem with a new Dell Wireless keyboard (WK717) and mouse (WM527). These devices have 3 wireless connection options:
- via dell universal receiver
- bluetooth
- bluetooth
The doc doesn't say what is the difference between the two bluetooth modes. With my Dell Precision 7530 (Ubuntu), I can connect both keyboard and mouse via bluetooth (2 only). When pairing the keyboard, I had to enter a numeric pairing code. After that the keyboard was not working at all, but the mouse works fine.
I managed to get the keyboard to work eventually, but this required the help of a MacBook Pro where I plugged the Dell Unifying Receiver and had the keyboard in mode 1. On the Mac, a keyboard dialog opened prompting me to type the key immediately to the right of the left Shift key and then to type the key immediately to the left of the right Shift key. After that, the keyboard was fully functional on the Mac.
Finally I plugged the Dell Unifying Receiver into my Ubuntu laptop.
Now, the keyboard works just fine. Note that I didn't attempt to install Solaar: The Linux devices manager for the Logitech Unifying Receiver since the Dell Unifying Receiver is different from the Logitech Unifying Receiver.
Solution 2:
The Universal Pairing software (downloaded from chosen accessory's software) does not have Linux binaries.
However if you have Windows available (possibly via Wine - n.b. untested)
- run the Universal Pairing software on Windows OS
- follow the steps to pair your accessories to a single Dell receiver
- then plug that receiver into your Linux machine.
Boom. A bit tedious, but you should only need to ever do it once.
HINT: don't do what I did and try to pair a device to multiple receivers! It seems the device can only pair to one at a time.
NOTE: I tried connecting a WM527 mouse via bluetooth and found it really laggy. Might be an issue with my adapters though.