SilverStone Raven RVM01B Mouse

Performance:

SilverStone's Raven RVM01B mouse was just released this past summer and sadly, it comes without any official Linux support. With this mouse also being new, there are no open-source programs created by the community that support configuring this mouse and all of its profiles and extra buttons. Though as this mouse relies upon a Philips twin-eye laser and Freescale controller -- rather than using proprietary SilverStone parts like what Razer does with their high-end mice -- it should not be as hard to do with these parts also appearing in other mice.

When plugging the mouse into an Ubuntu 8.04 notebook with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, the core functionality of the mouse had worked as expected. This mouse was detected as a "GMOUSE RAVEN by SilverStone" when looking at the dmesg logs with three input nodes being created. Through some additional probing, the mouse appears to be a product of KYE Systems Corp. The idProduct for this KYE System Corp device is 0x0084. Going through the products that are sold under the KYE Systems Corp brand, there is no mouse that precisely resembles the SilverStone Raven. However, with some of their products there is a flip 3D button, office / game modes, and other features found on the RVM01B.

For seeing which of these buttons work on Linux without any SilverStone driver or using any other custom configuration or third-party driver, we had monitored the button and key events using xev for viewing all X events. The left click, right click, and the middle scroll wheel (with its button too) had all worked as expected. We have never had a problem with any of these buttons on any USB 2.0 mouse. On the right hand side of the mouse are the forward and back buttons (when in the normal mode) and those created a button 8 and button 9 event, respectively. When trying out these buttons in Firefox 3.0, they had worked as expected in going back and forward through web pages. However, the scroll left and right buttons weren't detected as any X event.

While left and right scrolling hadn't worked, when it came to the page up and down buttons, they did work. The 99 and 105 keycodes were properly recognized and allowed for using these buttons as page up and page down. When the Raven mouse is in the normal/Vista mode, the preset DPI change button on the side scroll wheel does work as expected for toggling between 400/800/1600/3200 DPI, but no X event is created by this action.

Lastly, with the side scroll wheel / flip 3D, for each movement of the scroll wheel there are four X events emitted. The keycodes emitted are 23, 37, 50, and 115, which equate to tab, the left Control key, shift, and Super_L. It's equivalent to pushing all four of those buttons for each time the scroll wheel makes even the slightest move.

It's great that this mouse provides more functionality than many other gaming mice on Linux when using the generic input driver, but it's unfortunate not all of the buttons worked. The page up and page down are the extra buttons that worked and the side scroll wheel works too if you have some use for pressing tab, control, shift, and Super_L simultaneously. Then for the left and right scroll buttons there simply was no X event generated.

Testing the core functionality of the SilverStone Raven mouse we had used it throughout the GNOME 2.22 desktop with Firefox, OpenOffice, and Thunderbird. Additionally, some gaming was also done with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Nexuiz. Having a love for high-sensitivity mice, most of the testing was done while the Philips PLN2030 was at 3200 DPI. The mouse had worked smoothly and we experienced no issues at all with the mouse aside from the mentioned button issues.