MythTV Reloaded – Day 10
I’ve been doing a bit of research today and it doesn’t look good. Getting the remote working a matter of installing LIRC (either with yum install lirc or else building it manually). In the past, once it’s installed, I’ve had to load the lirc_imon kernel module which is the driver for my Antec Fusion 430 Black IR receiver. Then I would copy the correct lircd.conf file – in my case lircd.conf.mceusb – into /etc/lirc/lircd.conf. Once the module is loaded and the config file is ready, you start the lirc daemon and then run irw. At this point every time I press a button, it should register on the screen. But that isn’t the case this time around.
As I said, I’ve been doing a lot of research today and one of the things that I found was this bug report. As it turns out, starting with kernel version 2.6.32 (which just happens to be what CentOS 6.0 is based off of) the iMon IR receiver stops working. It appears that the way the input from this particular hardware is being handled is in flux. It looks like better support can be found in 2.6.35 and it has more or less stablized starting in 2.6.38… The part that has changed is in the kernel itself so installing LIRC manually does me no good. So now I face a decision. I can either get another IR receiver for my frontend maching (which would probably also mean reprogramming my universal remote which I don’t want to do) or else load another OS that uses a more current kernel… Decisions, decisions.
What would you do in my position? I think I know which way I’m leaning but I’d love to hear your feelings for or against either option. Or a third option is always welcome! Leave me a comment.
CentOS is a good
CentOS is a good distribution, but wouldn’t Ubuntu be a more media friendly distribution? It may have the newer kernel you need, and if you stick with LTS versions would still have the long release cycle.
I actually had Ubuntu 8.04
I actually had Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on the frontend prior to the upgrade but I found that I wasn’t as familiar with the inner workings as I am with RedHat based distros so I never did any maintenance to the system for fear of taking it offline for extended periods while I tried to fix whatever it was that I was trying to upgrade. For example, before loading Ubuntu on the system I was able to kill and restart the frontend app with the remote but could not figure out how to do that under Ubuntu. Granted, I didn’t spend much time with it because I didn’t want to keep the system down for a long period of time. Also, my DVD playback was hit or miss – usually miss. It would try to launch the DVD and then kick it back to the menu. Never had a problem with CentOS 5 which is what I had on there before Ubuntu. So I decided to go back to what I know. Maybe I’ll try Ubuntu again in the future.