I had issues with Solaar detecting my devices when plugging the dongle in a USB hub in the past, even when the connected devices worked. Maybe you can try to connect the dongle to another port, in best case directly on the Notebook or PC mainboard, just to make sure that this is not the issue.
This being said, it works for me on even with a USB hub on a freshly installed Fedora on a new PC.













Doesn’t matter. You can install it on any other hardware because Linux includes ‘cat’ already. You will not need the old one anymore.