LIRC - Linux Infrared Remote Control README.

Copyright (C) 1996 Ralph Metzler <rjkm@thp.uni-koeln.de>
Copyright (C) 1998-2010 Christoph Bartelmus <lirc@bartelmus.de>
Copyright (C) 2010-2011 Jarod Wilson <jarod@redhat.com>
(according to GNU General Public Licence 2.0 or later)

General

This is the README file for LIRC, the Linux Infrared Remote Control package. The main documentation of this package is available in HTML format at http://lirc.org. After building the documentation is also available at doc/html/index.html.

Updated versions of lirc is available using the website http://lirc.org.

Last version: 0.9.2a

Build and install.

More complete build and install instructions are available in the manual, the Installation chapter. The fast track:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

If you are upgrading from an older version of LIRC take a look at the NEWS file which contains all user visible changes between releases.

0.9.2a 8/2/15

• Maintenance release: bugfixes, no new features.
• Notably fixes #85, multiple --connect regression.
• Fixes bad bug for locating ~/.lircrc config file.
• Documentation and lirc.org updates.
• All in all 19 patches.

0.9.2 12/09/14

• Removed functionality:
  • The smode2 program has been retired from the build, although it still is available in contrib/.
  • The setup.sh script is removed (build always builds all drivers).
• Drivers are loaded dynamically. Many programs including lircd now needs to know where the drivers are located to be able to use them. There are new options, environment variables and hard-coded defaults. See the manpages for more.
• A new tool lirc-lsplugins is added to inspect dynamic driver modules.
• New, unstable configuration script lirc-setup. The script guides user when selecting both capture device and remote config. It sports auto- detection of most devices, searching and downloading from the remotes database and a considerable amount of bugs.
• The remotes/ directory has become obsolete, only used for testing. New configuration tools uses the remotes database at http://sf.net/p/lirc-remotes as the only source (#53). A new tool irdb-get(1) supports searching and downloading from remotes database.
• Building on MacOSX has been refreshed, multiple bugfixes.
• New devices and features:
  • Support for the Dangerous Prototypes irtoy device is added (#20).
  • Support for for sonyir on MacOSX is added. This is a single hiddev device; with the framework in place hopefully more devices will be added over time.
  • Support for the DIY assembly kit yard2 usb ir device is added. This is an experimental driver which depends on a server which currently is not packaged in any major distro; a Debian/Ubuntu PPA is available.
  • Support for the Roku remote protocol added (#8).
  • Support for long keypresses has been added. See the "Configuring LIRC" chapter in the manual, search for "ignore_first_event" (#50).
• lircd has been verified to run as regular user as long as it can open devices and such. A new option --effective-user makes lircd drop it's privileges after opening devices if started as root. A new udev rule is shipped to make /dev/lirc* accessible for users in group 'lirc" (#56).
• Logging runtime option is renamed: debug -> loglevel. Levels can be given symbolically e. g., 'info' or 'error'. Old option name is still supported.
• Configuration changes
  • The default location for the user lircrc-file has been changed from ~/.lircrc to ~/.config/lircrc. The old location is still used as fallback. (ticket #52).
  • The lircd.conf configuration has been updated. lircd will now besides the lircd.conf file also read all *.conf files in the /etc/lirc/lircd.conf.d directory. The already existing include directive has been modified to accept wildcards and also been documented.
  • lircd.conf has a new 'driver' attribute for configs requiring a specific driver. Supported by irrecord(1), used by lirc-setup(1) and irdb-get(1).
  • Mechanisms to disable the implicit sorting of remotes has been added, and the automatic sorting has been enhanced (ticket #56).
  • The enabling of lircrcd mode synchronization daemon has been changed. The old "#! lircrcd" shebang is deprecated and a new, global lircrc option "lircrc_class" is added (#62). The lircrcd sockets has been moved to /var/run/lirc (#61). This might break some corner-case installations.
• Dependencies:
  • Build scripts now requires python3.
  • Build requires the pkg-config package, in particular /usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4
  • python3-PyYAML is strongly recommended. lirc builds without it, but crippled (no table.html or lirc.hwdb, lirc-setup doesn't work).
  • Doxygen is required to build api docs (ignored if missing).
  • man2html is required to generate html manpages (the bundled version is dropped). If missing, no html manpages are generated.
  • lirc-setup requires gtk3 libraries and python3-gobject bindings, these are not required to build.
  • help2man is no longer required.
  • kernel sources are not required.
• New configure options:
  • --with-systemdsystemunitdir=... Installation path for systemd files (ticket #49).
  • --with-lockdir=... Serial lock directory, /var/lock or /var/lockdev (ticket #44).
  • --enable-python3-fix: Install python3 wrapper to actual python3.x version, bug walk-around for MacOSX.
• Several options to configure have been dropped:
  • --with-syslog: Logging defaults to using syslog, but using the --logfile runtime option switches to file loggging.
  • --enable-debug: All builds have debug enabled.
  • --daemonize: Always enabled.
  • --enable-sandboxed: Devices are created in runtime.
  • --with-driver=... The build always builds all drivers
  • --enable-maintainer-mode: lircd.simsend and lircd.simrec (test tools) are always created although not installed.
• Installation changes.
  • The so-version of the liblirc library is bumped, backwards-compatible.
  • The lircd and lircmd sockets are not created at installation any more, they are created on demand by the servers. If there already is e. g., a /var/run/lirc/lircd socket it will still be used without changing permissions (#46).
  • The long-standing issues with parallel make are fixed.
  • Many more files are installed in the data directory e. g., configuration files and a local copy of the lirc.org website.
  • Old, non-functional kernel modules are removed.
  • The configuration data which was in several places including configure.ac and setup.data is now in the configs/ directory.
• API and programming features.
  • Support for sending data has been added to the lirc_client.h API. (ticket #35).
  • lirc now installs three separate libraries: lirc_private (internal), lirc (for external applications) and lirc_driver for drivers. Each library has a so-file to link to, a header file for compilation and a pkg-config .pc file for build. Applications and drivers have been refactored to use the libraries.
  • The hard-coded socket used by the lirc_client API can now be tweaked using LIRC_SOCKET_PATH environment variable (ticket #31).
  • There are examples in the sources how to build new drivers. The documentation in this area is also improved (see the driver-api guide and doc/api-docs).
  • The doc/ directory has support for creating doxygen API documentation.
• Test overhaul: new unit tests available in test/. New test tools irsimsend and irsimreceive which works without lircd. The lirc-codec-regression-test script has been updated.