Linux Debian support - Streamzap driver in Debian LIRC?

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Author Streamzap driver in Debian LIRC?
Robert McDonald

2006-12-26, 1:12 pm

I am probably overlooking something simple but I am stumped.

I have Etch with the 2.6.18 kernel with Lirc version 0.8.0-9 installed.
From the docs on sourceforge it seems this version should support the
Streamzap USB remote, and there is a /usr/share/lirc/remotes/streamzap
directory in my installation.

lircd --driver=help shows a list of drivers, but the streamzap remote is
not listed.

The streamzap IR receiver appears in cat /proc/bus/usb/devices, but it
does not appear in cat /proc/bus/input/devices.

I don't see any Debian bugs listed concerning the streamzap.

Any suggestions for what to do next? Is Debian's version of LIRC
incomplete or am I missing something obvious?

Thanks!

Bob
Robert McDonald

2006-12-27, 1:12 pm

Robert McDonald wrote:
<snip>
> Any suggestions for what to do next? Is Debian's version of LIRC
> incomplete or am I missing something obvious?


Well, to follow up on my post, it looks like LIRC is at least somewhat
broken. I tried to compile the CVS version of LIRC and setup.sh won't
run. It is looking for a subdirectory under /lib/modules that Debian put
somewhere else. (There is a bug report about this.)

Question: If I were to copy the subdirectory to the location that
setup.sh is expecting, would I break anything? Would it be preferable to
modify setup.sh to point to the (incorrect) location? I would think that
LIRC is a deadend package, in the sense that nothing is going to depend
on it, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I'm relatively new to linux and I
don't understand what might be ramifications down the line of changing
something like this.

Thanks for any advice or help in thinking about this the right way.

Bob
Robert McDonald

2007-01-06, 7:18 pm

I got the streamzap working. I'm going to post
here what I did in case it is helpful to anyone else. I found this post
very useful in getting a sense of the overall strategy:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....&highlight=lirc

My problem was that LIRC 0.8.0 as installed by Debian did not include
lirc_streamzap, the necessary kernel module for the streamzap remote. I
am using the 2.6.18 kernel with Debian etch. I do not claim that all of
the following steps are necessary, so if anyone cares to comment or
correct obvious misstatements or misunderstandings I would be quite
interested. The critical step is to compile a kernel module for the
streamzap. After that, Debian lirc seems to work fine.

I am not going to detail every little step here because 1) I don't
remember every little step and 2) none of the step-by-step directions I
found worked in my case, so I am supposing that mine will likely not
work in your case. Here is what I did:

0. Cleaned out everything from my former attempts to get this working,
including lirc and lirc-modules-source.

1. Installed linux-source-2.6.18 and unzipped it, and made a soft link
so that /usr/src/linux pointed to the unzipped source. I ran "make
oldconfig" and "make prepare" in the /usr/src/linux directory. I also
created the Rules.make file ("sudo touch /usr/src/linux/Rules.make") as
in the above post.

2. Obtained lirc-0.8.1pre4.tar.bz2 (from CVS snapshots in www.lirc.org)
and unzipped it.

3. Ran ./setup.sh, selected the streamzap (from the usb section). After
configure, ran make and make install.

4. modprobe lirc_streamzap (this installs the streamzap module).

5. apt-get install lirc . This installs the 0.8.0 version of lirc. I did
this in order to a) avoid a manual install and b) to leave apt in
control of LIRC. I suspect will make future upgrades easier.

6. Copied lircd.conf.streamzap (which is included with Debian lirc) to
/etc/lirc/lircd.conf, and told /etc/lirc/hardware.conf to load lirc_dev
and lirc_streamzap.

7. "/etc/init.d/lirc restart". Using irw, I confirmed that all is working.

This is really just a sketch, but I hope it's helpful. I think it will
be necessary to repeat the building of lirc_streamzap when doing a
kernel upgrade, at least until Debian includes this module in lirc.

I should note that one posting I found said to check
/proc/bus/input/devices for the remote. The streamzap (which is USB)
doesn't appear there even after it's working. Instead, you can check for
the existence of /dev/lirc0 (assuming you just have one IR device).
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