Plantronics Savi 7xx-M and Linux mouse or lockup problems

Last Modified: Thu, 16 Aug 2012 18:12:22 +0000 ; Created: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 21:34:50 +0000

I have a Plantronics Savi 7xx-M headset attached via USB to my computer (HP EliteBook 8560w) running Fedora 17 Linux. I started to get weird lockups of my mouse or constant mouse click actions. Short story buggy driver with Linux kernel 3.4.5-2.fc17.x86_64. I also constantly saw "ALSA sound/usb/clock.c:236 22:2:1: cannot get freq at ep 0x84" in my logs.

To Fix:

  1. Unplug the headset USB cable
  2. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
  3. blacklist snd_usb_audio
  4. modprobe -r snd_usb_audio
  5. Note that you can no longer use the headset in Linux. You can use it inside a VM though.

Update - 16 Aug 2012

I received the following message from Gerben Meijer (thanks!) with some pointers on some work arounds:
...

I ran into two issues with it.

One, the mouse/keyboard problem you mentioned. The device presents itself as an usb sound card, a mouse and a keyboard. To make X11 ignore the keyboard and mouse features (which are fine in windows but Xorg does not like it), I added this to xorg.conf:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier  "Plantronics"
        MatchVendor "Plantronics"
        Option      "Ignore" "true"
EndSection

This will make X11 ignore the mouse and keyboard features and stop weird things from happening.

So then you can use the USB audio card, but I ran into another issue there. On linux, all audio was clipping. Turns out this was a Pulseaudio bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/416190

Which was pushed upstream to pulseaudio only yesterday.

So with those things in place it works perfectly fine on Linux; I do recommend configuring it to wideband audio once in Windows. It seems to remember those settings. Haven't found a way to control those from Linux.