libratbag

libratbag is a configuration library for gaming mice. It provides a generic way to access the various features exposed by these mice and abstracts away hardware-specific and kernel-specific quirks.

libratbag exports the devices over a DBus daemon called ratbagd, see the ratbagd DBus Interface description.

Compiling libratbag

libratbag uses the meson build system which in turn uses ninja to invoke the compiler. Run the following commands to clone libratbag and initialize the build:

git clone https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag.git
cd libratbag
meson builddir --prefix=/usr/

And to build or re-build after code-changes, run:

ninja -C builddir
sudo ninja -C builddir install

Note: builddir is the build output directory and can be changed to any other directory name. To set configure-time options, use e.g.

mesonconf builddir -Denable-documentation=false

Run mesonconf builddir to list the options.

Running ratbagd as DBus-activated systemd service

To run ratbagd, simply run it as root sudo ratbagd. However, ratbagd is intended to run as dbus-activated systemd service and installs the following files:

/usr/share/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.ratbag1.conf
/usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.ratbag1.conf
/usr/share/systemd/system/ratbagd.service

These files are installed into the prefix by ninja install, see also the configure-time options -Dsystemd-unit-dir and -Ddbus-root-dir. Developers are encouraged to simply symlink to the files in the git repository.

For the files to take effect, you should run

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl reload dbus.service

And finally, to enable the service:

sudo systemctl enable ratbagd.service

This places the required symlink into the systemd directory so that dbus activation is possible.

libratbag Internal Architecture

libratbag has two main components, libratbag and ratbagd. The former is a library to access the devices. It consists of the front-end API and wrapper code, and the back-end HW-specific drivers:

+-----+    +-----+    +-----------+    +----------+
| app | -> | API | -> | hw-driver | -> | protocol | -> device
+-----+    +-----+    +-----------+    +----------+

The API layer is HW agnostic. Depend on the HW, the protocol may be part of the driver implementation (e.g. etekcity) or a separate set of files (HID++). Where the protocol is separate, the whole known protocol should be implemented. The HW driver then only accesses the bits required for libratbag. This allows us to optionally export the protocol as separate library in the future, if other projects require it.

Adding Devices to libratbag

libratbag relies on a device database to match a device with the drivers. See the data/devices/ directory for the set of known devices. These files are usually installed into $prefix/$datadir (e.g. /usr/share/libratbag/).

To add a new device to libratbag, simply drop a new device file into that directory and restart ratbagd. See the data/devices/device.example file for guidance on what information must be set.

If the device doesn't work after adding the device file, you'll have to start reverse-engineering the device-specific protocol. Good luck :)

Source

git clone https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag.git

Bugs

Bugs can be reported in the issue tracker on our github repo: https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag/issues

Mailing list

libratbag discussions happen on the input-tools mailing list hosted on freedesktop.org: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/input-tools/

Device-specific notes

A number of device-specific notes and observations can be found in our "device-notes" repository: http://libratbag.github.io/device-notes/

License

libratbag is licensed under the MIT license.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: [...]

See the COPYING file for the full license information.