[mythtv-users] lircd unreliable after Ubuntu upgrade 16.04 > 18.04

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2019 21:24:18 +0100, you wrote:

>On 13/03/19 19:05, Allen Edwards wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 10:48 AM Zach Cutlip <uid000 at gmail.com
>> <mailto:uid000 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>     Hello,
>> 
>>     After upgrading my MythTV setup from Ubuntu 16.04 (lirc 0.9.0) to
>>     Ubuntu 18.04 (lirc 0.10.0), and jumping through various hoops to get
>>     lircd working again, I'm finding it to be very unreliable.
>> 
>>     Any suggestions, or things to try?
>
>
>Most likely an upgrade problem. The upgrade to 0.9.0 requires manual
>intervention [1]
>
>Cheers!
>--alec
>
>
>[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lirc/+bug/1791409

The lirc package as installed by 18.04 is broken.  There are a number
of problems with it, but the one that is most obvious is that
lirc-setup does not work at all (it can not find required library .so
files).  Your problem sounds like one of the other problems, which is
that it sets up systemd to run lircmd, lirc-uinput and irexec as
daemons, but does not set up valid configuration for those daemons. So
they run in the background and one (I think it is lircd-uinput) steals
keystrokes from the main lirc daemon.  So try running these commands
and see if it fixes your problem: 

sudo systemctl stop lircmd
sudo systemctl stop lirc-uinput
sudo systemctl stop irexec
sudo systemctl disable lircmd
sudo systemctl disable lirc-uinput
sudo systemctl disable irexec

Alternatively, if you want to fix all the problems I found in 18.04's
lirc package, you can download and run the script I wrote:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/lirc-ubuntu-18.04-install.sh

It fixes lirc-setup, the above problems and probably a few more I have
forgotten about.  It needs to be run with sudo or as root.  I am a bit
surprised that your lirc is working at all - the 16.04 to 18.04
upgrade does not normally produce a working lirc setup, so you must
have done a lot of manual configuration.