lirc and ubuntu 7.04 feisty experience i wanted to share

[Jason A. <ja...@de...>]

Several weeks ago, I set up a MythTV box running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 
(7.04) with kernel 2.6.20-16-generic.  I'm using a Hauppauge PVR-150 
card, with the built-in (as in non-USB) IR receiver (I don't use the 
blaster functionality, just the remote.) I tried the ubuntu lirc package 
and couldn't get it to work (see below.) I followed several different 
ubuntu-specific guides with no success.   Finally, I went to 
www.lirc.org and downloaded the latest CVS snapshot, installed from that 
source, and it went mostly OK.  I say mostly, because I had one 
particular issue that I couldn't seem to resolve.

At first, I had trouble getting lircd to work after the machine was 
rebooted.  for whatever reason, there was no link to /dev/lirc0 being 
created upon boot.  I solved this with a quick and dirty shell script to 
make a symbolic link from /dev/lirc to /dev/lirc0 and this solved that 
problem.  However - and this is weird - if I SHUT DOWN the machine, as 
in physically powered it off (shutdown -h) then upon booting the machine 
again, lircd would not work again, and this time, the only way I could 
get it to work was to go back to the source directory and do a "make 
install" again. 

Anyway, somehow in trying to solve this problem I really messed things 
up and could not get lircd to work at all, even by reinstalling it.  I 
reinstalled the entire machine, reinstalled mythtv, and reinstalled 
lircd the same way I remembered having done it before, and could not get 
it to work.

 What was happening this time was the same thing that happened when I 
tried the ubuntu packages:  that when I would run "irw" to test the 
remote, it would drop back to the command line and kill lircd.  The log 
reported "could not open /dev/lirc" and "default_init(): no such device" 
but /dev/lirc was clearly listed in /dev and was accessible, etc.  It 
was not creating /dev/lirc0 like it was supposed to... just plain not 
working.

Anyway... Long story short.  Just now I realized that 2 new updates had 
been released since the time I installed the box the first time.  On a 
whim, I downloaded the CVS snapshot which I deduced to be the same one I 
had before, based on the date -- lirc-0.8.2pre1.  Bingo.  It works now.  
I have my remote back again! I don't know what it is about pre2 and pre3 
- I tried both - and both exhibited the above behavior.

As of this writing, I haven't yet rebooted the machine to see if lircd 
comes back.  I'm kind of afraid to. :)

Anyone have any thoughts?

-Jay