Jeff Malterre

First I’d like to say how happy I am that *every* key/mouse button works except the Flip 3D/Zoom keyboard buttons – which I’m going to be working on soon. Everything works out of the box, even horizontal scrolling with mouse wheel tilt left/right. I’m pretty impressed!

With all the keys working and utilities available for the MX5500, getting mail notifications via keyboard is really easy to do. What keyboard notifications am I talking about? In Windows, the keyboard will give a little beep when a new email is received. Also, a mail icon will pop up in the LCD on the keyboard.

First we need a mail notification application that can run custom commands on new email received and email checked (we need something to get rid of the mail icon once the mail notification has been acknowledged.) Here’s a good one: Mail Notification. Note: if you have problems with getting SSL to work, you’ll need to add a source to the repository to get an updated version (see https://launchpad.net/~mail-notification-ssl/+archive/ppa).

Once we get Mail Notification installed, we’re going to need a utility to control the keyboard functions (such as the beep and LCD icons.) This utility is called mx5000-tool. We’re not going to go into instructions on installing this, as they are readily available via a quick Google search. Here is a good link to follow to get this utility installed: http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Logitech_Cordless_Desktop_MX_5000#Installing_mx5000-tools.

Next we’re going to make two scripts, one for new mail and one for read mail. I like to keep things organized in my home directory, you can place these scripts anywhere you want.
~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_new.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
 
#send a beep to the keyboard
mx5000-tool --device /dev/hiddev0 -b
 
#set the mail icon on the keyboard to 1 - on
mx5000-tool --device /dev/hiddev0 -i 1000

~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_read.sh:

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#!/bin/bash
 
#set the mail icon on the keyboard to 0 - off
mx5000-tool --device /dev/hiddev0 -i 0000

Remember you need to make these 2 files executable: chmod +x ~/.scripts/mx5500/*

Now to pass these scripts as custom commands for the mail notification app.

Run gconf-editor by either running that in a terminal or hit ALT+F2, type ‘gconf-editor’ an hit ENTER. Browse to apps -> mail-notification -> commands. Here we see ‘mail-changed’, ‘mail-read’ and ‘new-mail’.

Click on ‘new-mail’ and change the ‘command’ value to “~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_new.sh” (without quotes.)

Click on ‘mail-read’. Now when I was entering the custom command for this function, the ‘command’ value was set as an integer. Go ahead and double click it and change it to a string. Now, change the ‘command’ value to “~/.scripts/mx5500/mail_read.sh” (again, without quotes.)

That’s it! You can now sit back and enjoy the keyboard beep boop.