May 2016

Logitech H820e Wireless Headset and Linux Mint

I recently got a new Logitech Wireless Headset so I could use a soft phone (Bria), Google Hangouts, and Skype more effectively at work.  Out of the box there was nothing to do other than plug the headset into the USB and immediately I had audio.  Of course, not everything worked.

Working:

  1. Volume up and down worked no problem

  2. Audio and Sound working

Not Working:

  1. Phone call pick up button
  2. Microphone mute — disables the mouse and takes control of the mouse event handler
  3. And…a lot of white noise.

The fixes:

White Noise

The first issue reported today was I had much white noise. I opened the sound settings in Linux and saw that I have three microphones and three speakers. On the input side I clicked on the built in microphone and turned it off. Second, I click on the Analog microphone and muted it.  Finally, I clicked on the headset microphone and change the gain with a colleague listening in and letting me know when it sounded correct.

Mouse Handler

This issue was more problematic for me as I could not mute the microphone at first, then that started working. However, once muted  the mouse on the machine would no longer work. After some research I found these links that gave some insights. My fix is at the end.

Unity looses mouse click handler when using enabling USB headset

[SOLVED] No mouse left-click with USB headset GN9350e

I am running Linux Mint 17.3.  Thus, from the instructions above I have no /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d folder.  But, combining the information from the first support thread I made a file in the /usr/share/X11 folder.  Instructions are as follows:

  1. Open a terminal window
  2. type “lsusb” and press enter
  3. Locate the device in question…for me it is the logitech.  The line looks like this:
  4. Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:0a49 Logitech, Inc.
    1. NOTE the ID: 046d:0a49
  5. Browse to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d folder
  6. Right click and choose “Open as Root”
  7. Right click and choose “Create new Document”
  8. Choose “Empty Document”
  9. name the document something like “50-LogitechInc.conf”
  10. Paste the contents below into the file and then SAVE the file.  Make sure to name the Identifier to match your hardware (I used the Logitech definition) and paste in your USB ID properly.  My file looks like this:

Section “InputClass”

Identifier “Logitech, Inc.”

MatchUSBID “046d:0a49”

Option “Ignore” “on”

EndSection

May 17, 2016 by Linux