A Gaming Mouse Vendor That Has Linux Drivers

While Razer and Logitech manufacturer some terrific mice for computer gamers along with other gaming peripherals, they unfortunately do not provide any official Linux support. There have been community projects like Lomoco for supporting Logitech's extra mouse features under Linux and RazerTool for supporting some Razer mice, but without any full-featured support from the vendor. The smaller gaming peripheral vendors like Mionix are also no better at providing Linux support, but there is now at least one new vendor supporting such efforts.

Stefan Achatz has been working with a vendor known as Roccat to improve their Linux support. Roccat manufactures a few different mice and keyboards along with some other gaming products like mouse-pads and headsets, but is not a vendor we previously have ever heard of. Their products also don't seem to be available at Amazon, NewEgg, or any other major American Internet retailer for that matter. They do seem to have some presence though in Europe and the rest of the world.

Stefan has already written a Linux kernel driver for the Roccat Kone mouse, which was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel. He also tells us that for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel he plans to have a driver ready for the Roccat Pyra mouse and potentially the Kone[+] as well. He has also written the open-source user-land utilities for these Roccat products too and those can be found on SourceForge.

These products do look interesting though they may be to not quite the same quality and feature-set as the latest Razer mice and their technology, but at least there's growing open-source support for their products.