Is the Dell Universal Pairing USB receiver supported?

Question

Dell sells wireless keyboards and mice that use a Dell Universal Pairing system.

Does this work out of the box in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

May I suggest a workaround?

I ran into this problem with a new Dell Wireless keyboard (WK717) and mouse (WM527). These devices have 3 wireless connection options:

• via dell universal receiver
• bluetooth
• bluetooth

The doc doesn't say what is the difference between the two bluetooth modes. With my Dell Precision 7530 (Ubuntu), I can connect both keyboard and mouse via bluetooth (2 only). When pairing the keyboard, I had to enter a numeric pairing code. After that the keyboard was not working at all, but the mouse works fine.

I managed to get the keyboard to work eventually, but this required the help of a MacBook Pro where I plugged the Dell Unifying Receiver and had the keyboard in mode 1. On the Mac, a keyboard dialog opened prompting me to type the key immediately to the right of the left Shift key and then to type the key immediately to the left of the right Shift key. After that, the keyboard was fully functional on the Mac.

Finally I plugged the Dell Unifying Receiver into my Ubuntu laptop.

Now, the keyboard works just fine. Note that I didn't attempt to install Solaar: The Linux devices manager for the Logitech Unifying Receiver since the Dell Unifying Receiver is different from the Logitech Unifying Receiver.

Answer 2

The Universal Pairing software (downloaded from chosen accessory's software) does not have Linux binaries.

However if you have Windows available (possibly via Wine - n.b. untested)

1. run the Universal Pairing software on Windows OS
2. follow the steps to pair your accessories to a single Dell receiver
3. then plug that receiver into your Linux machine.

Boom. A bit tedious, but you should only need to ever do it once.

HINT: don't do what I did and try to pair a device to multiple receivers! It seems the device can only pair to one at a time.

NOTE: I tried connecting a WM527 mouse via bluetooth and found it really laggy. Might be an issue with my adapters though.

Answer 3

Apparently it works out of the box on 18.10, according to this comment by Morteza Milani, so presumably it will work on subsequent versions as well.

According to this 2016 PDF for KM636, which uses the Dell Universal Receiver, Ubuntu is supported:

The same is stated in this 2015 PDF for the WM126, which also uses the Dell Universal Receiver:

According to Device 'Dell Universal Receiver', it is "detected" by Ubuntu 18.10 and above:

Notes on the Dual mode Bluetooth

Following on from Nicholas Roquette's answer, the two Bluetooth modes refer to Dual Mode Bluetooth:

Bluetooth has evolved from Bluetooth 1.0 to the current iteration of Bluetooth 5.0, and each version came with big changes in how Bluetooth devices interact with each other (read about Bluetooth 1.0 vs 2.0 vs 3.0 vs 4.0 vs 5.0 here). Between Bluetooth 3.0 and Bluetooth 4.0 came Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE for short. BLE presented an entirely different use case, one that made Bluetooth 3.0 (also known as Bluetooth Classic) still relevant. This posed a problem for some devices that had multiple uses, like smartphones.

This is where having both Bluetooth Classic and BLE became important. We discussed this topic in another previous blog here at Symmetry (read the post here).

Dual-Mode Bluetooth 5 represents the advancement of this need. By having both Bluetooth Classic and BLE, applications can have the best of both worlds, on that incorporates powerful, long-range Bluetooth with power-saving BLE and Bluetooth MESH.

Interestingly, the 2016 PDF for the WK717 suggests that Ubuntu is supported for the 2.4 GHz connection, but not for the "dual-mode" Bluetooth connection:

Answer 4

I can confirm this model works on Ubuntu 20.04.

Model:  Dell KM7321W

Universal Pairing (first device):
Works out of the box for both mouse and keyboards.

Second and Third Devices:
Mouse: Connect directly. Keyboard: Need to enter six digits --> enter via keyboard and push enter.

On Windows, it is also required to enter six digits for connecting keyboard.

Answer 5

The link you provided is dead and it seems clear that they aren't compatible with the Logitech Unifying Technology devices. I cannot find any mention of this Dell technology working under any version of Linux. The safe bet is to just say no. If you bought any of these devices I hope for your sake I'm wrong, but I can't find any evidence to disprove my conjecture. If you have one and obtain the output of lsusb you can check here to see it the device has previously been reported as recognized.