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
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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
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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
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