Got IR and RM working in linux

Xero · Post by **Xero** » Sun Sep 05, 2004 1:52 pm

I had no idea this was possible but it is and it was much easier than I thought it would be. I've got IR running under wine and remote master runs natively (as it's java.) Does anyone other then me think something about this should be put in the jp1 help section?

I'd be willing to write some documentation. It was quite easy to do, although it may require a kernel recompile if you don't have support for user-space parallel port devices. That was the trick in getting it working in my case.

Post by **The Robman** » Sun Sep 05, 2004 3:04 pm

Did you get IR to communicate with the remote itself?

Go ahead and write up whatever you can.

Xero · Post by **Xero** » Sun Sep 05, 2004 9:45 pm

The Robman wrote:Did you get IR to communicate with the remote itself?

Go ahead and write up whatever you can.

IR communicates with the remote no problem. It has a slight delay before it uploads but it's not long at all (3-4 seconds maybe.) Even time syncronization works (with extender 2 on my 15-2117) which I was kinda surprised...

Xero · Post by **Xero** » Sun Sep 05, 2004 11:22 pm

Here's my first draft:

https://www.xeron.cc/ir_rm_linux/

Here's a backup copy:
http://www.hifi-remote.com/jp1/ir_rm_linux.html

jon_armstrong · Post by **jon_armstrong** » Mon Sep 06, 2004 7:23 am

Just out of curiosity does decodeIR.dll work to decode learned commands?

gfb107 · Post by **gfb107** » Mon Sep 06, 2004 8:44 am

For the RM part, on Linux you don't need to run Setup.jar. That's only for creating the file associations under Windows that will automatically launch RM when double-clicking a .rmdu file, or clicking a link to a .rmdu file in IE.

If there is a way to create similar file associations in Linux, I would like to know about it. Also, if there is anything I can include the RM distribution to make it easier to use RM (for example the rmaster file that you created) I would like to know about that as well.

Xero · Post by **Xero** » Mon Sep 06, 2004 3:09 pm

gfb107 wrote:For the RM part, on Linux you don't need to run Setup.jar. That's only for creating the file associations under Windows that will automatically launch RM when double-clicking a .rmdu file, or clicking a link to a .rmdu file in IE.

If there is a way to create similar file associations in Linux, I would like to know about it. Also, if there is anything I can include the RM distribution to make it easier to use RM (for example the rmaster file that you created) I would like to know about that as well.

Ah I didn't know that. I've removed the setup.jar part from the guide. There really isn't any way to what you describe in linux as a whole except with executable files. I know you can get the kernel to recognize windows executables and run them accordingly with wine however I'm not too sure how you'd do that with a remote master file.

There's no standard file manager under linux, but I am pretty sure individually you could configure nautilus, konqueror, or one of the many others out there to "click and run" remote master files pretty easily. I don't use a file manager so this is irrelevant to me. I just start up RM and open the files from there...Supposedly the just released filesystem Reiser4 will have the ability to add "descriptions" and such to files and it will have the ability to accept plugins and stuff, using that ability may make things like this easier to do on a system wide scale in the future, however I doubt everyone will choose to use reiser4 and at that it's adoption will take some time...

Xero · Post by **Xero** » Mon Sep 06, 2004 3:13 pm

jon_armstrong wrote:Just out of curiosity does decodeIR.dll work to decode learned commands?

As my remote uses extender I had not tried this however I just uploaded my original un-extended configuration to the remote, learned a command, downloaded the setup back from the remote, and viewed the command in "Learned signals" without a problem, then re-uploaded my extender configuration. So to answer your question, as far as I can tell, it works fine.

Here's a screenshot:
http://www.xeron.cc/ir_rm_linux/ir_rm_linux.jpg (1600x1200 image on my slow server, be warned)

Here's a backup copy of the screenshot:
http://www.hifi-remote.com/jp1/ir_rm_linux.jpg

jon_armstrong · Post by **jon_armstrong** » Mon Sep 06, 2004 4:20 pm

That's pretty cool! Thanks for the effort to find out.

Revwillie · Post by **Revwillie** » Wed Apr 06, 2005 9:41 am

What about OSX? I guess I don't know enough about it to be sure, but if it is a BSD variant, can the kernel be recompiled for the parallel port control? Is there a Wine-like emulator for OSX?

This was the only (current) thread I could find concerning Mac compatibility:

http://www.hifi-remote.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=753

benjamintm · Post by **benjamintm** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 1:36 pm

There is a Mac port (http://darwine.opendarwin.org/) underway for wine, but it's not working yet.

A better solution (IMO) is to expand RemoteMaster to include IR functionality, which would give a single, unified application for multiple operating systems.

Ben

Post by **The Robman** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 2:35 pm

benjamintm wrote:A better solution (IMO) is to expand RemoteMaster to include IR functionality, which would give a single, unified application for multiple operating systems.

No argument here, we're just looking for volunteers to undertake the coding. You up for it?

Xero · Post by **Xero** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 3:26 pm

Nice to see that my thread has been made sticky...hopefully it's helped a few people out. I figure I'd post a note saying that a few weeks ago I updated my guide (http://www.xeron.cc/ir_rm_linux) for the new versions of wine which use wine registry entries for configuration instead of the old ~/.wine/config file. Other than the required changes to get that going, everything is still working great for me on linux.

davecs · Post by **davecs** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 6:21 am

A lot of the stuff in a number of instructions for different things in Linux talks about compiling certain things into the kernel, and that can be scary for some.

For many people, the Linux distro they use may already have the kernel compiled in a suitable fashion. I use PCLinuxOS, and when I made the "regedit" entries as described in your article, and also set Wine to run ir.exe as "Win 98" instead of the default Win2k, everything worked just nicely.

So thanks for your instructions, you've now reduced by dependency on Windows to almost zero. To anyone else thinking of trying this, but finding the thought of recompiling their kernel scary, just skip that bit. You may get lucky and find it works anyway.

Lurker · Post by **Lurker** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 5:22 pm

Perhaps the part about regedit can be explained further? That is the scariest part for a novice.