I need help migrating my lirc setup to the kernel-provided modules in 2.6.38

[Jeremy T. <jer...@gm...>]

Hi all,

In short: I'm going from 2.6.34 to 2.6.38 (vanilla kernel, on gentoo),
I have an "eHome Infrared Receiver" ("mceusb"), and I have a Harmony
One remote (that's configured to act as a TiVO Series 2 remote).

Up to now I've used a (slightly) modified version of the provided
lircd.conf for TiVO Series 2:
http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/tivo/TIVO_Series_2 . Trouble is,
that no longer works when I use the modules included with the 2.6.38
Linux kernel (which, it seems, I now *must* do).

So here's what I've done:

- I built a new kernel and enable all the LIRC goodies, I installed
LIRC 0.8.7 from source (sans modules)

- I tried using my old lirc config, which didn't work. Nadda from irw.
Tried upgrading to LIRC 0.9.0, no luck. I googled around and read up
on devinput, which sounded like the next thing to try.

- I tried using dev/input: I mucked around with ir-keytable -t and
switched through all the protocols, with no success. I enabled debug
logging on rc_core and mceusb and none of the protocols seemed to have
any luck decoding consistently. I had some *very* sporadic luck with
the NEC protocol, but it registered only a few keys and then
unreliably, and when it didn't detect them I didn't get a keycode in
dmesg, either.

- I gave up on devinput and tried using /dev/lirc0 again; since
"mode2" and "cat" showed results of some sort there, I thought I'd try
to make a new lircd.conf

- I tried irrecord, which seemed promising at first (events were
clearly registered and I was seeing dots on the screen during the
first phase), but when it got time to label keys, it told me
"something went wrong!" and to use raw mode.

- I tried using the "raw" mode of irrecord which kind-of worked, a
little bit. Finally, irrecord showed results! However, keys didn't
repeat at all, and sometimes events were missed completely.

- I started writing this email to this mailing list

I realize it's probably tempting to blame Gentoo, since it provides
one with so many wonderful ways to shoot oneself in the foot, so I
saved the best part for last: I see basically the same behavior on
Ubuntu natty (2.6.38 + lirc 0.8.7) as well as Debian Wheezy (2.6.38 +
lirc 0.9.0_pre1).

So, questions:

- Is this brave new world of linux kernel provided LIRC modules
supposed to remove the ability to use remotes that worked before?
- If so, is there a list of remotes that *do* still work, so I can
tell my Harmony One to mimic one of those?
- If not, um, what do I do next?

Thanks,
Jeremy