MythTV Part II - Getting the remote to work

I love ravioli. What does that have to do with getting a remote to work within MythTV on CentOS - absolutely nothing, but it was really good for dinner tonight! Whew I feel better, now on with the show!

Getting my Hauppauge IR Blaster (aka remote) that came with my Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 to work has been the bane of my existance since my last MythTV post. When I first started, I saw that Jarod Wilson explained how to set up LIRC using YUM here and suggested using the following:

yum -y install lirc-kmdl-$KVER
yum -y install lirc

I ran that and it seemed to install properly. I then ran the following:

cp /usr/share/doc/lirc-*/remotes/hauppauge/lircd.conf.hauppauge /etc/lircd.conf

and that too worked. Then as per the instructions I added code to my /etc/modprobe.conf so that lirc would load before ivtv. Now my /etc/modprobe.conf looks like the following:

alias eth0 tulip
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1
options snd-card-0 index=0
install snd-emu10k1 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-emu10k1 && /usr/sbin/alsactl restore >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
remove snd-emu10k1 { /usr/sbin/alsactl store >/dev/null 2>&1 || : ; }; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove snd-emu10k1
alias usb-controller ohci-hcd

# LIRC stuff
alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c

# ivtv modules setup
alias char-major-81 ivtv
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv

# LIRC stuff
install lirc_i2c /sbin/modprobe ivtv; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install lirc_i2c

Then finally I tried to run:

/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c

to start up the lirc stuff and no dice, I received the following errors:

lircd: could not open /dev/lirc
lircd: default_init(): No such device

After much searching it turns out that the version of lirc_i2c that you use must be compiled with the same compiler that your os was compiled with (or something to that effect). So then I thought that I should take the plunge and compile it myself. Nothing like rolling up the sleeves to get down and dirty. But before I try to get down and dirty, I want to know what I'm getting into so after uninstalling the lirc stuff via yum, I proceeded to check out this very skimpy how to guide by mythtv.org - here. I was hoping for something a little more in depth so I then checked out the install guide provided by LIRC themselves here and that was great. I downloaded version: lirc-0.8.0 (the latest stable at the time). NOTE: 9/2/2007 - these instructions work with lirc-0.8.2 as well) After extracting all of the files to a folder on my desktop (yep the desktop - it's the Windows in me), I then proceeded to follow the "Compiling" instructions on the LIRC site listed above. I ran:

./setup.sh

and the wizard popped up and I populated all of the necessary fields and chose to have it run the configure (since it autopopulates the config options). Now it was either at the "make" step where I received an error something to the effect: "lirc_dev: class_create failed" This was bad. I spent many an hour searching for the fix to this. Then I tried just going into the code of the installer where it said it had the problem and just commented out the lines. What's the worst that could happen - well it bombed in a second point and I killed that line too. Then it worked! Well before I get too happy I tried "make install" and that ran. This was too good to be true, but there had to be a reason for those lines of code so I tried to run:

/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c

but that bombed out too. Ok it looks like those lines were really meant for something. So I backed out:

make uninstall
make clean

and Googled some more.

Then I finally came across: RE: Centos 4.3/4.4 unable to compile any LIRC version (0.7.2, 0.8.0, CVS). It wasn't my version, but heck it was worth a look. The problem as I found out was in the installer scripts on the lines I commented out. "...the recent kernel has two new functions and macros (named class_create and class_destroy) which conflict with the same lirc functions." His suggestion was renaming the functions by prefixing it with "lirc_" in every instance and wouldn't you know it, that worked!

The two files that needed changing are:

[installer location]/drivers/kcompat.h
[installer location]/drivers/lirc_dev/lirc_dev.c

I ran configure/make/make install and everything went smoothly. Then I tried:

/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c

and no errors in /var/log/lircd !!! This was jolly good. I went back to the LIRC site and continued on to installation. They mentioned this and it happened to me - when you first get this running you'll find the lirc running in /dev/lirc but after a restart of services/computer etc, for me it is now running in /dev/lirc0 . This is important, because when you want to start up the daemon later you need to point to the device like this:

lircd -d /dev/lirc0

After testing with mode2 and irw it was back to Jarod's guide to continue with getting it to work with MythTV.

wget http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/lircrc-haupgrey-g3.txt
mkdir ~/.mythtv
mv lircrc-haupgrey.txt ~/.mythtv/lircrc
ln -s ~/.mythtv/lircrc ~/.lircrc

This is great at this point I tried running MythTV and my remote was working! Ok so the next logical step is to make sure this works after a restart - well for me it was a bust. I have a feeling that it has to do with order of startup and using something like rc3.d (which I don't know about yet). So what I did when I got the machine up and running was open a terminal and run the following commands manually:

/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c
lircd -d /dev/lirc0
echo 16384 > /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes
/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe ivtv

This seemed to work sometimes (sometimes the remote would only work with mode2 but not MythTV). So then I thought about doing something like a startup script and putting them in there. After searching, it appears that there is a startup script area within ~/.kde/Autostart where you can throw an executable .sh file and it will run at some point during start up (I'm not really sure when). I created: myth-load.sh with the following:

#!/bin/bash

# Only do this stuff if we're on the main display
# (i.e., don't do this in a vnc session)
if [ `echo $DISPLAY | grep -c ":0"` -ge 1 ]
then
echo "myth-load.sh starting..."

echo "loading lirc..."
# Load LIRC (remote control)
echo "running: /sbin/depmod -a"
/sbin/depmod -a
sleep 4s
echo "running: /sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c"
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c
sleep 4s
echo "running: lircd -d /dev/lirc0"
lircd -d /dev/lirc0
sleep 4s

echo "loading ivtv..."
# Load IVTV (capture card)
echo 16384 > /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes
echo "running: /sbin/depmod -a"
/sbin/depmod -a
sleep 4s
echo "running: /sbin/modprobe ivtv"
/sbin/modprobe ivtv
sleep 4s
echo "myth-load.sh completed"
fi
exit

Now I have the "sleep" in there just to make sure everything has a good enough amount of time to run. It is probabaly not needed. Now one note about shell scripting that I fell prey to because I was borrowing an example without fully understanding what a command does - If you use an "&" after a command like this:

/sbin/depmod -a &
lircd -d /dev/lirc0

then BOTH command will run simultaneously. The one with the "&" is set as a background process. This was messing me up for a long time. As of tonight and a couple restarts later I am not having any problems with my remote.

WHEW!