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2.1 Installing Librekontrol

Librekontrol is available exclusively for GNU/Linux systems. It is dependent on device definitions in the kernel Linux and its sound subsystem. Thus, it is not portable to other systems.

Running Librekontrol requires the following software:

In addition, the following software is required to build Librekontrol from source:

If installing Librekontrol from source, simply follow the standard GNU method for installing software:

  1. Unpack the source archive: ‘tar -xzf librekontrol-0.2.1.2.tar.gz’.
  2. Navigate to the source directory: ‘cd librekontrol-0.2.1.2’.
  3. Run the configure script: ‘./configure’. Run ‘./configure --help’ to view configuration options, including setting the installation directory via --prefix.
  4. Compile the software: ‘make’.
  5. Install the software: ‘make install’.

Finally, Librekontrol requires that the user has permission to read and write to input devices. The following steps require administrator access to the system.

Each input device is defined by a file-like interface in the /dev/input directory. Check the owner/group of the input device file interface:

$ ls -l /dev/input
total 0K
...
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 64 Mar 20 21:24 event0
crw-rw---- 1 root input 13, 65 Mar 20 21:24 event1
...

Here we see that files are owned by root and belong to the input group. In order to access the input files, add your user to the appropriate group. For example, ‘gpasswd -a myuser input’. If, for whatever reason, your /dev/input directory looks different, you might have to give user input-event permissions via udev rules

Finally, you need to a) be sure that the “uinput” kernel module is loaded (e.g. by running ‘modprobe uinput’) and b) create a udev rule to give users in the input group permission to read and write from the /dev/uinput device:

Create a file at /etc/udev/rules.d/99-librekontrol.rules that contains:

KERNEL=="uinput", GROUP="input", MODE="0660"

After you reboot your system, you should have full access to input events (including “virtual” events used in button remapping in Librekontrol).

Caution: Do not run Librekontrol with elevated privileges (i.e. as root). It can run arbitrary Scheme code, which is a bad idea to do as a superuser without good reason. You should use the group method described above to avoid the need to run the software as root.


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