Working Firefly Remote with Fedora FC6 and LIRC

A while ago I bought a Firefly Radio remote - the buttons in my ATI remote were wearing out. For the longest time it worked with my old ATI receiver. Then time passed and it ceased working, my TV died, I upgraded to Fedora Core 6 and bought a new TV.

It took a bit of digging and a bunch of helpful posts, but I finally got my Firefly working under FC6. Here's what I did:

# yum install lirc

You probably know what LIRC is.

# yum install dkms

I apparently have been living in a wet cardboard box for the past decade. You know all those third party drivers that have scripts to hand compile their kernel modules each time you upgrade your kernel (ala ./vmware-config.pl and the NVidia stuff), well Dynamic Kernel Module Support is a standard, easy way of handling those kind of things. I don't know how popular it is, but it makes good sense. Their page has a few links on what it does and why it's relatively cool. It's simple, it's documented, and it works. I'm sold.

Once it's installed, you should be able to type "dkms status" without any errors.

Now, FC6 has LIRC drivers built through DKMS. So go get them. I got mine from here, but I'd imagine googling for "lirc dkms fc6 rpm" will help you find your way. Make sure you've grabbed the FC6 ones.

# rpm -ivh dkms-lirc-0.8......etc..etc..noarch.rpm

First, try your luck at just building them (change the version accordingly):

# dkms build -m lirc -v 0.8.1-1.fc6.rf

If that didn't work, and the make.log complains about SLAB_CONFIG, you'll need to do what I did. Apparently SLAB_CONFIG is now known as GFP_KERNEL. Edit the .c files found with this:

# grep -l SLAB_CONFIG `rpm -ql dkms-lirc`

Done? Good. Run it again to make sure you didn't miss any. (The patching tip came from here.)

Now build again. It should print "This should take a few minutes.." dots as you patiently hope it works. Installing once it's done is pretty simple:

# dkms install -m lirc -v 0.8.1-1.fc6.rf
...scroll...
# dkms status
lirc, 0.8.1-1.fc6.rf, 2.6.20-1.2925.fc6, i686: installed

Okay. That's the hard part. I followed bits of this post for the rest. I ran modprobe lirc_atiusb by hand, and edited /etc/modprobe.conf as he suggested. I also used the /etc/lircd.conf config he specified - but I had to fix the name line. I booted up lircd in non daemon mode (because anything with "ircd" in its title should have a non-daemon mode):

# lircd -n &

I also symlink'd /dev/lirc0 to /dev/lirc. You probably want to do the Right Thing - whatever that is. Anyway, I ran the test app and pressed some buttons:

# irw
lircd-0.8.1[10441]: accepted new client on /dev/lircd
00000014739e0000 00 OK Firefly

Sweet!

The Silence of A:\> ...

I came home from my day job to find one of my machines having a "bad day". You know the kind... the hard drive makes clicking noises, the CPU fan wheezes, and the little speaker beeps a magical yet significant number of times on power up. Yeah, one of those bad days.

During the recovery process I found myself dd'ing an old image of a MS-DOS bootup disk I had onto a floppy and rebooting. After a bit of scrolling, up came the "OS":

A:\> _

Normally this machine does a bit of everything; it's got X running, OpenVPN'd into a shared VLAN, DHCP for my home, streaming mp3s to my stereo, my home CVS server, my general development box - the works. Normally the work of millions of developers across the planet keep the machine dizzily busy.. calling IDLE when it's not CPU bound... is it time to power save the monitor..who has 192.168.0.1..ssh keep alive.....who's got the sound card locked anyway..time to garbage collect..adjust time time, the clock drifted...lets POP for mail.. time to update the locate database..better clean up /tmp....better update the package cache too....YooHoo/2u2...etc..etc..

I don't know if you can relate...But, thinking about all of it boggles my mind and makes me want to go to outside and do something tangible.

But just then, for that brief moment, with just the DOS prompt, that machine sat there very still. Very quiet...not doing anything (except flashing the cursor).

It was all very serene.

I'm sure it's great that we live in our quirksmode adjusted, AJAX enabled, ORM persisted, 3D accelerated, UTF16 displayed, XML configured, multi-threaded, AOP cross-cut, project object model assembled, virtualized, garbage collected world; but I can't help, looking at the innocence of that prompt on the monitor and wonder if maybe.. just maybe, there's a better, simpler way to do some of this.