Perry’s weblog

I’ve helped a couple folks on the Gentoo forum with their Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP TV tuner card. Here are some notes on getting the remote to work. I guess I’ll work backwards.. I’ll put up some info on the getting the tv tuner itself to work later.

lirc is used for controlling the remote.

After you emerge it, you’ll want to put lirc_gpio in modules.autoload.

The device Gentoo makes/uses for the remote is /dev/lirc/0. I had to modify /etc/init.d/lircd to make lircd use that device.

start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec /usr/sbin/lircd -- --device=/dev/lirc/0

lirc needs a configuration file to tell it what button name corresponds to what code it revieves. I think I’m using the one that came w/ the unstable version of lirc in portage.. it goes in /etc/lircd.conf.

Once you have your config file in place, and lircd running, you can run irw as root. It should show you what button name was pushed, which will coorespond to the buttons in lircd.conf. If that works, your remote it working properly.

Then it’s time to make config files for your TV and other programs you want to control with the remote. That will go in ~/lircrc. There are two programs you use to interact with the various programs — irxevent and irexec. irxevent is used for sending keystrokes to a program, irexec is used for running programs based on they remote keypresses. Here are a couple examples:

begin
        prog = irexec
        button = POWER
        config = sudo /sbin/halt
end

begin
        prog = irxevent
        button = RECALL
        config = Key BackSpace xawtv
end

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2003 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.