In today's article we will teach how to install Razer products in the most popular Linux distributions through the OpenRazer project.
Razer products are well-regarded for their first-class workmanship, better gaming performance and advanced peripheral configuration such as keyboards, mice, mousepads and headsets, but applications that do this are only for Windows. and macOS, leaving Penguin people unofficially supported in this regard. Nonetheless, you won't get in the way as there are some very good alternatives to using your Razer on Linux.
OpenRazer officially supports several distros, here we will talk about Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but if you use Fedora, openSUSE, Manjaro or the like, just follow the information from the official site.
First we need to install the Razer driver, OpenRazer, we will do that including the project PPA. It has two versions, one stable and one in constant development, the daily (unstable).
To add PPA we can do it in two ways, graphically or via terminal. If you want to see how to add a PPA graphically check out this blog article explaining the procedure. Let's go to the commands, which are very simple.
Let's add the stable version of OpenRazer
First open the terminal via your distro menu or by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa: openrazer / stable -y && sudo apt update && sudo apt install openrazer-meta -y
After that just restart your computer. Remember that this repository has support for Ubuntu 16.04 or later and Linux Mint 18 or later. A reboot is required as this is a module that will be added to your district's kernel.
Done that you will be able to choose 3 programs to manage your Razer peripherals, we will show how to install the 3, both have similar features but with different looks.
The first one Polychromaticmost beautiful, probably very easy to install, just add the project's PPA and install it through that command line, similar to what you did with OpenRazer itself
sudo add-apt-repository ppa: polychromatic / stable -y && sudo apt update && sudo apt install polychromatic -y
The second is RazerGenie that you can install in two ways, by downloading and installing via the .deb package or by using its repository.
To download the .deb package just click on this link (for Ubuntu 18.04 version). But if you prefer to use the repository, the procedure is:
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hardware:/razer/xUbuntu_18.04/ /'> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hardware:razer.list"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install razergenie -y
RazerGenie is also available via Flatpak, on Linux Mint, just search for it in the app store, on Ubuntu, you need to enable Flatpak and Flathub support.
And if you need the public key, the procedure is here:
wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hardware:razer/xUbuntu_18.04/Release.key -The Release.key
sudo apt-key add – <Release.key
Finally we have razerCommander, which you can install via flatpak or .deb. To learn how to install Flatpak in your distro, check out this blog article on how to do it. And to download the .deb just access this link.
And we also made a video showing how the Abyssus mouse behaves on Linux.
Tell us in the comments if you have any Razer peripherals and if this tip helped you configure it better.
Until next time and a big hug.
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