LIRC

The LIRC project used to work about 10 to 15 years ago. But since that time it has been very poorly maintained, and never seems to get to a state where one can successfully compile it from source code. Some of the programs won't compile because of missing header files that were removed from Linux 10 years ago, and they are still required today! If I install the version released on the Ubuntu install disc it does work until you do the first software update to the OS then it gets broken again and you cannot fix it, because you cannot even compile the kernel modules from source code! I have scoured the internet with thousands of google searches to try to find answers to my problems and there just aren't any. Someone should spend some serious time and clean up this mess! I tried to get it working with three different IR receivers and each of them had problems of it's own (Serial, Iguana IR, & USB FTDI with bit banging). Using existing .deb packages I was able to get each of these receivers to show proper waveforms in xmode2, but none of them to connect to irw. I got one version to compile, but the RCMM protocol was broken so irw showed nothing when RCMM remotes were active. That makes lirc useless for my AT&T Uverse remote that uses RCMM protocol. Overall I am very disappointed with the state of this project. If you want to concentrate on fixing one thing, make the kernel modules compile from source. Then one could install from .deb or yum packages and fix the problems created during updates by recompiling just the kernel modules. (That would be a good place to start the cleanup)!