[SOLVED/INFO] Getting lirc macmini driver to work on Intrepid

[jnorth]

After spending several days tearing my hair out and reinstalling/researching/rebooting/modprobing/changing HAL and UDEV, I figure the least I could do is post in case anyone else has this issue.
I do not claim to be an expert on lirc at all, though I do have quite a bit of *nix experience in general.

Symptoms:

• Lirc was working in Intrepid up until some updates sometime during the lat 3 weeks. I did a system update and my remote no longer worked. After the update, no irw, no /dev/usb/hiddev0, no nothing.
• A reinstall with all updates has same symptoms, PLUS, X/gdm grabs the input
• The device appears as a keyboard input instead of a HID input as it should. You may be able to deal with this using the dev/input lirc driver, but that drops the number of available commands - since I use a Harmony remote with many functions learned, I have to have the macmini driver.

Causes/Solutions that worked for me - I've narrowed it down to the following list of what I had to do from a fresh install after figuring this out. Maybe it seems simple but it was a living hell for me.

• Apparently someone decided to arbitrarily roll out mouseemu in an update. This was the hardest part for me to find. This package is for touchpad functionality - this is a mac mini with no touchpad, so I don't need it - remove it, just watch your dependencies and make sure it doesn't break anything else on your install - it didn't on mine but YMMV.

  sudo dpkg --purge mouseemu

• Appleir kernel driver gets in the way. If you use it, good luck, plus you have to use the dev/input driver which limits the amount of functions you can use. I swear I had to have it enabled on prior kernels, but it breaks **** now. So, let's kill it off:

  sudo echo "blacklist appleir" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

• Apparently HID devices were (accidentally???) disabled in quirks in a recent update? I dunno, but you have to re-enable it or you'll never get a proper /dev/usb/hiddev0 device to use. So:

  sudo echo "options usbhid quirks=0x05ac:0x8240:0x10" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options

• Now set up your lirc again according to the many other tutorials out there. Use /dev/usb/hiddev0 for your REMOTE_DEVICE line in(or if you have others use the one that is your IR reciever, still most likely hiddev0) and macmini for your REMOTE_DRIVER line.

Good luck - hope this helps someone.

[cyberdork33]

I think this issue validates a bug report in launchpad. I would suggest that this is reported there if it already isn't (you might also want to test Jaunty).

[jnorth]

Gladly - I'm searching for that bug now, any chance you have the # offhand? I'll find it though.

Re: testing with Jaunty, I'll give it a shot in the next week or so when I get a new usb drive that I can do testing with on the mini hardware, my girl will kill me if I take down the frontend again

[cyberdork33]

Re: testing with Jaunty, I'll give it a shot in the next week or so when I get a new usb drive that I can do testing with on the mini hardware, my girl will kill me if I take down the frontend again

hehe. been there.

I don't want to ask too much of you, but if you have spare time, a wiki page for the MacMini hardware could use a lot of help. If you don't want to that is fine too, I just try to ask when users with certain hardware come into the forums. Bug report is more important though

I don't know of a bug myself, though I know there are at least some old appleir bugs int here somewhere, but they may not be related.