[mythtv-users] Problem with lirc

Nick knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Thu Apr 6 00:06:45 UTC 2006


On 06/04/06, James Oltman <cnlibmyth at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Doesn't mean the permissions can't be wrong. If the /home/
> > mythtv/.mythtv directory was created by root you would have that
> > problem.
>
>
> So forgive my incompetence, but i don't know how to check that.  i can give
> you an ls -la on that directory.
>
> -rw-rw-r--   1 mythtv mythtv 5773 Apr  5 16:06 .lircrc
> drwxrwxr-x   5 root   root   4096 Apr  5 16:14 .mythtv

Here we can see the .mythtv directory is owned by user and group
'root'. Non-root users have only read and execute permissions.

> in the .mythtv directory:
>
> -rwxr-xr-x   1 root   root   5773 Apr  5 16:14 lircrc
>
>
> I did have to create it as su root.  So I'm stumped.  Thanks!!

Because the .mythtv directory was not writable by non-root users, you
needed to use su root. File ownership and permissions are so important
to running Unix-based systems. You will need to understand what they
mean, and how to alter them. If using the commandline for maintenance,
chown and chmod will become second nature to you. For more information
on them, run

$ man chmod (for altering file permissions)
$ man chown (for altering file ownership)

So, if you su root, you can alter the permissions on the
/home/mythtv/.mythtv directory by:

# chown mythtv:mythtv /home/mythtv/.mythtv

and similarly for the lircrc file. Afterwards, the directory and file
should be owned by user mythtv, meaning you can vi lircrc and save the
file successfully.

With regard to LIRC, I have a ~/.lircrc file which I then link to
~/.mythtv/lircrc. Only MythTV uses the file in ~/.mythtv, mplayer and
xine will look to for a ~/.lircrc file for their remote actions.

Nick


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