My ongoing experiences with Ubuntu, and later Mythbuntu, as a media center with MythTV. I'm also using the system for a virtual machine server, a mediawiki server and a general all around home infrastructure base.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

LIRC (remote) not working

I rebooted my Ubuntu system and suddenly the remote wasn't working. I poked around and noticed lirc was not running.

# ps auxwww | grep lirc
root 14915 0.0 0.0 2884 752 pts/0 R+ 21:09 0:00 grep lirc
#


Poking around in the logs, it looked like lirc was dying when lircmd was started (I verified this by starting them sequentially):

# tail /var/log/daemon.log
Jul 30 21:00:43 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: lircd(userspace) ready
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: accepted new client on /dev/lircd
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: could not get file information for /dev/lirc
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: default_init(): No such file or directory
Jul 30 21:00:48 casey lircd-0.8.2-CVS[6792]: caught signal
#


So I downloaded LIRC 0.8.3 (I had been running 0.8.1) from the project download page and build according to directions at: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/LIRC_on_Ubuntu_Edgy_Eft

Then the daemon seemed to start fine, though I still had to reboot to get the remote working.

# /etc/init.d/lirc start
Starting lirc daemon: lircd lircmd.
# ps auxwww | grep lirc
root 14842 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 21:07 0:00 [lirc_dev]
root 14909 0.0 0.0 2876 552 ? Ss 21:09 0:00 /usr/sbin/lircd --device=/dev/lirc
root 14911 0.0 0.0 1636 236 ? Ss 21:09 0:00 /usr/sbin/lircmd
root 14915 0.0 0.0 2884 752 pts/0 R+ 21:09 0:00 grep lirc
#

5 comments:

Cheyo Pimienta said...

Hi

I need to restart the lirc daemon every time i want to reboot... have you managed to solve ur problems?

Intrepid Ibex Here... ^ ^

Von Welch said...

Hi Cheyo,

My post is a little unclear. Downloading and installing LIRC 0.8.3 fixed my problems.

Cheers - Von

Von Welch said...

Cheyo - I misread your post - you are having to start the lirc daemon by hand every time you boot?

You should have a file called /etc/init.d/lirc that starts lirc on boot. Do you have that file?

Von

Cheyo Pimienta said...

Sorry for my bad english, as you can see, it's not my primary language.

Let try me clarify this in the sake of general knowledge: i recently aquired a Media Center Remote Control (an HP one, from a friend) and it works like a charm under Intepid and XBMC (i live on a tropical place, so it is fantastic to control music and movies from my hammock).

The thing is that everytime i reboot my PC, the daemon seems to run great, but the irw command dumps nothing and XBMC doesn't recognize the remote at all.

My workaround is to type sudo sh /etc/init.d/lirc restart so the daemon restarts and my remote is recognized... but being a little obsessed with my Desktop, i'll try to install LIRC 0.8.3 and see if it fixes this little inconvenience for me.

Thank you amigo!

Von Welch said...

Hi Cheyo-

I don't have any better suggestions for you than to try the latest version. I haven't run across the problem you have (deamon running but not working until restart).

Good luck.

Von