UR86E Lirc problem

English Hardware
1

I have just upgraded from 11.1 to 11.3 and I can’t get the thing to work. Before a sample from dmesg read:

lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, major 61

lirc_atiusb: USB remote driver for LIRC $Revision: 1.71 $
lirc_atiusb: Paul Miller <pmiller9@users.sourceforge.net>
lirc_dev: lirc_register_plugin: sample_rate: 0
lirc_atiusb[6]: X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver on usb2:6
usbcore: registered new interface driver lirc_atiusb
now I get:

146.377036] usb 2-10: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 6
146.566511] usb 2-10: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc7, idProduct=0005
146.566519] usb 2-10: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
146.566525] usb 2-10: Product: USB Receiver
146.566529] usb 2-10: Manufacturer: X10 Wireless Technology Inc
146.581615] input: X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/usb2/2-10/input/input7
It doesn’t even seem to be using the write driver.

Some searching suggested it may be being assigned as a keyboard and the xorg log indeed shows:

146.619] () X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Applying InputClass “evdev pointer catchall”
146.619] () X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Applying InputClass “evdev keyboard catchall”
146.619] () X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Applying InputClass “LocalKeyboard”
146.620] () X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: always reports core events
146.620] () X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Device: “/dev/input/event5”
146.623] (II) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Found 9 mouse buttons
146.623] (II) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Found relative axes
146.623] (II) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Found x and y relative axes
146.623] (II) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Found keys
146.623] (II) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Configuring as mouse
146.623] (II) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: Configuring as keyboard
146.623] () X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
146.623] (**) X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200
146.623] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device “X10 Wireless Technology Inc USB Receiver” (type: KEYBOARD)

Any ideas how to get it back to being the lirc device it should be?

2

Well for the record, I seemed to get round that part adding a line to /etc/udev rules for lirc. The suggested attribute name did not work but modalias seemed to do something. i couldn’t use the suggested /input/ir because that duplicates what a tv card shows. Currently I have:

KERNEL==“event*”, SUBSYSTEM==“input”, ATTRS{modalias}==“input:b0003v0BC7p0005e0100-e0,1,2,k71,72,73,74,77,80,84,8B,96,98,9C,9F,A7,A8,B0,CF,110,111,113,114,160,161,166,179,185,192,193,197,19C,r0,1,amlsfw”, SYMLINK+=“lirc”

lircd starts up ok but if I try to connect with say irw, I get:

lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: lircd(default) ready, using /var/run/lirc/lircd
lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd
lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: could not get hardware features
lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: this device driver does not support the LIRC ioctl interface
lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: did you mean to use the devinput driver instead of the default driver?
lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: Failed to initialize hardware
lircd-0.8.7pre1[3859]: removed client

Google seems to be full of problems, some eventually finding an answer and some downgrading lirc (not that I can see how to do this without breaking loads of dependencies) to get things working again.

I hate saying this but I’m really fed up with Linux at the moment. When I first started with 9.2, I used to look forward to upgrading. //Now, I dread it, whether it’s KDE4 brought in at IMO an alpha stage or this, there always seems to be new bright ideas and things that used to work broken. I’ll probably lighten up soon but at the moment, I feel like the quality control of Linux has gone to the dogs.

3

I’ve found my solution. I’ve put ubuntu 10.04.1 on instead. Installing the lirc package does all that is needed to select from a list of remotes (although I have changed thier /etc/lircd.conf file for mine) and have things working (for me with my remote anyway) straight off with no messing. An additional update repository provides the same version of mythtv as provided by packman for opensuse 11.3 (and it was conflicts with different versions of mythtv in different versions of Opensuse that started this - upgrade all to 11.3 seemed the best option but I hadn’t foreseen the lirc problem…)

Anyway, I think I’ll be keeping the others on OpenSuse at least for a good while longer. I still much prefer Yast and as a KDE user, think OpenSuse KDE is streets ahead of kubuntu which I found so poor I opted for the straight ubuntu, not that I suppose KDE vs Gnome it matter much to me with this box. It’s only really a tv viewer connected to the tv in the lounge.

One thing’s for sure though. That is that while I generally much prefer it, OpenSuse simply wasn’t worth any more struggling and failing for this particular task.