Short answer: It’s not exactly trivial, but it does indeed work once you have the necessary pieces in place.

Long answer…

I had heard a bit about the community based Linux support for Logitech’s line of programmable Harmony remotes, but didn’t really have the need to investigate until I upgraded my Western Digital media player over the holidays.

The first piece of the puzzle was a command line app called Concordance.

I went to compile the source from the author — fortunately I found this first in the release notes:

The best way to install this software in Debian or Ubuntu is with the packages in those distros: sudo apt-get install concordance

Phew!

Once installed I invoked the app with a terminal command, and got this:

Um, ok…

A bit of Googling yielded a more precise command:

sudo concordance -i -v

Which clearly showed that my remote was detected on my computer’s USB bus:

I could have proceeded with text commands but instead chose to add congruity — a gui app — into the mix:

Only problem was, the following message filled up the next screen:

ERROR: Precisely one filename argument is required

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/usr/bin/congruity", line 1932, in main raise CmdLineException("ERROR: Precisely one filename argument is required")

CmdLineException: ERROR: Precisely one filename argument is required

Googling that reminded me that I had to be logged in to Logitech’s Harmony users portal to download the specific device control settings to my remote. Once I was signed in, the rest of the procedure was really no different than using Windows or OS X:

Hopefully I’ve documented the necessary steps here well enough for you to get your own Harmony remote connected and set up via Linux. If I can make things more clear (or I got something wrong) please leave me a comment and let me know.

Yet again a humble and heartfelt thanks goes out to all the clever folks who have made this possible. 😎