Divine Lunacy

There are always a few “rough edges” in linux… Every once in a while, I sit down and try, once again, to fix one of them. yesterday, I decided I wanted to get the remote control for my Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum Pro ZS working. Getting the signal to be recieved and decoded wasn’t really that hard. When it came time to make the buttons actually do something, things got worse ( still working on that ). The “livedrive” sends the commands from the remote control to a midi device. In my case, this device is: /dev/snd/midiC0D1. TO check and make sure the commands were being recieved from the remote, I did: [mario@mario snd]$ cat midiC0D1 . There was output each time a button was pressed. It was then time to install LIRC. I configured it to use The livedrive midi thing. The install/compile went flawlessly. I then downloaded the config file for my remote from the lirc website. To start lircd, I used this command: root@mario lirc-0.7.0]# /usr/sbin/lircd --driver=livedrive_midi --device=/dev/snd/midiC0D1 --output=/dev/lircd. [mario@mario ~]$ irw /dev/lircd Verified that everything up to this point was working correctly. ( it Outputs the name of the button pressed each time a button on the remote is pressed. ) Ironically, I thought it would be easy from there… Making the commands actually do something is easyily setup through the lircrc file ( ~/.lircrc or /etc/lircrc ). I was able to make it control my volume using amixer:
begin
    prog = irexec
    button = Vol_Up
    config = amixer Set Master 5+
    delay = 0
    repeat = 1
end
That worked fine, but in order to release the full power of the remote, I need it to control a media player… I was able to make it control MPlayer using irxevent to generate “fake” x events. It was still not good enough for me.

Still lacking a “good” media player, I decided to try installing totem again… I’m still at that part. I finally managed to make it past the configure, but it failed during compilation. After downloading the newest sources, I’m stuck compiling the latest version of GTK+. Why does everything end up at GTK+ with me?!? Amazingly, GTK compiled smoothly. Alas, a dependency nightmere. Now I have to run along and fine ‘iso-codes’. hmm… That was easily found and compiled… w00t!!! Totem configured!!! Now compiling totem… Now cursing because the compilation failed… Now, I will spend all day trying to get some verscion of totem installed. Perhaps I will even try an RPM. I bet it would be easier to compile a gnome media player if I actually had gnome.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 0809:43 and is filed under dev/tech, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.