One of the small but annoying little bugs I've encountered has to do with my Logitech k750 keyboard.
When the unifying receiver is connected to one of the USB ports on the Steam Machine, the receiver is detected (it shows up in dmesg and lsusb), but I cannot get input from the keyboard to register. I've been using an old PS/2 keyboard to get started and troubleshoot the issue with the Logitech.
Going on a piece of information from a related bug report, I tried connecting the receiver via a USB hub, instead of directly to the box.
Oddly enough, this worked.
Looking at several bug reports for other Linux distributions has led me to the conclusion that this is an issue with the 3.10 kernel (which SteamOS currently uses). There was a patch for the problem in 3.9, but it was removed for a real solution in 3.10... which turned out not to work. It is also fixed again (for real this time) in the 3.11 kernel.
In the meantime, there are various utilities for configuring Logitech unifying receivers and their connected devices. After installing one of these and manually disassociating and then reassociating the keyboard, I was able to get input while the receiver was directly connected (not on a hub). I used the solaar package's command line tool.
So everything should be great, right? Well... no.
For some reason, having solaar installed prevented the Steam Machine from getting through its next boot. Uninstalling solaar immediately allowed the machine to boot again.
Weird, right?
The SteamOS developers mentioned in a comment that they are moving to the Long Term Support Industry (LTSI) tree, and that any fix to this issue will be held off until after this switch to see if the problem is fixed in the LTSI tree.
In the meantime, a USB hub keeps my keyboard working just fine.
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