I’m hoping to use the IR remote controller that came with this PC to control xbmc media player. I’ve just spent most of the day surfing and searching for howto info, and I now feel like I know no more than I did when I started.
I won’t bother to record all I have and haven’t tried so far except to say that I’ve installed lirc (& deps) w/ Yast, and I’ve enabled irda in Yast as well, and from that point on I’ve been hampered by my own inability to understand much (if any) of the howto info available. Unfortunately most of what I’ve found and read on many, many forums is terribly out of date and/or written by and for apparently knowledgable geeks already familiar with the terminology they’re using to communicate with each other. It’s not their fault that I can’t follow their jargon, but I still need some howto guidance written in very basic terms.
Can anyone help out by pointing me to a very basic howto or by walking me through this process?
If you have already installed lirc packages, see if the modules are loaded or not:
su
modprobe lirc_serial
modproble lirc_dev
Make sure that your /etc/sysconfig/lirc file contains correct entries for the infrared port (most probably /dev/ttyS1).
See if you have the device /dev/lirc0
(If this device is not there, the installation was not complete).
Ouch, I didn’t dare remove and reinstall, as Yast gave me such an Awesome # of dependency warnings that I simply chickened out and opted to simply “update” instead. No change, same results when I reran the commands above.
Since you have a built-in IR port, you may have to load lirc_sir module (it should automatically get loaded by the lirc_dev module). But, I don’t see that is included in the lirc package of openSUSE when installed through Yast.
Last time, I played with lirc was when I assembled an IR circuit for my old machine. That time, I had to compile the kernel to build support (as per the HOW-TOs at the lirc web site) for lirc.
I don’t recommend to re-compile your kernel if you don’t have that experience.
Let us wait for inputs from someone who used lirc with IR port.