Okay, I've been struggling with this for weeks. It's rare for me to actually use the forums, normally I simply peruse untill I stumble on a solution. Well I'll try and start from the beginning and any help would be awesome.

I installed R5A16 and it worked great but I couldn't get the remote (a REALmagic serial) working. The receiver would flash when I pressed buttons but irw would simply kill the lircd process. I tried reconfiguring with lirc-reconfig.sh hundreds of times with varying options.

I read in previous posts that R5A16 had some problems with its build of LIRC so I uninstalled it and installed version 7.0. This seemed to work a little bit better. If I ran irw it would run, it just wouldn't show any key inputs. If I ran cat /dev/ttyS0 (not entirely sure what this does) then it would freeze solid once I pressed a key on the remote. Same with cat /dev/lirc. I tried recompiling with all sorts of different options.

So this is the weird part. Out of curiosity/stupidity/desperation (take your pick) I decided to try to run knoppmyth's lirc setup utility lirc-reconfig.sh. It said that parts were missing but ran anyways, except it started after the remote selection section and skipped to the auto detect modules. It built without any errors.

Then everything worked. I didn't restart, it just started working. The receiver light wouldn't flash anymore unless irw or MythTV was running. Both apps worked great with the remote. So the ultimate test was to restart. and of course it didn't work after that. I couldn't repeat my accident either. So I don't know what fixed my problem. Maybe a different driver got loaded, maybe lirc-reconfig.sh loads some command that I'm missing.

Now everything works like it did before my accident. Here are some impressions that I have picked up from the forums since I've been trying to get this working. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

My remote does not need the bootmisc.sh commands setupserial*** (or else it's already loaded because I get an error if I try to run this) or modprobe lirc_serial (when I run I believe it says lirc_serial doesn't exist)

So which driver am I suppose to use? pixelview or realmagic(or are they the same)?(seems to think it's using the pixelview)

Well I don't know what info would help troubleshoot this so please ask for anything more(I'm fairly new to linux, so you might have to point me in the right direction command wise.)

Great forum here, thanks in advance for any help. You are a champ.

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working hard towards not being a newbie

I don't know much about your particular remote, but you might want to try lirc-0.7.2.

As I recall it's got a nice menu driven installer which made it real easy to setup my StreamZap.

I too had lots of problems with the lirc-reconfig.sh, so I wouldn't count on that.

okay, thanks gb I'll try that. I hadn't yet because I thought R5A16 had a problem with anything past 7.0 but a nice configure interface sounds promising. Are you using R5A16? and are you using a serial remote?

Thanks for your help.

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working hard towards not being a newbie

Well 7.2 didn't work, same reaction as 7.0. Any other ideas? It seems to me that the problem has to be either something that isn't starting or binding correctly in the beginning or possibly the wrong driver? I don't know. I love MythTV and am always intrigued by linux but it seems I always run into a problem I can't overcome. Maybe I'm just too stuck in the thought process of troubleshooting OSX and windowz. I'm going to do a reinstall and try starting from scratch. Thanks for the help.

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working hard towards not being a newbie

so it seems that the solution was a lot simpler but also quite weird. If I had the remote receiver plugged in when I installed Knoppmyth then it wouldn't work. I think maybe it saw it as a mouse. So anyways try installing Knoppmyth first and then plug in the serial remote. Wow that took me a long time to figure out. Almost gave up.

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working hard towards not being a newbie