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

[Will Dormann]

On 3/13/19 10:27 PM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> 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.


Reviving an old thread here...

Having some spare time, I decided to take the plunge to upgrade my 
MythTV box running the soon-to-be-unsupported Ubuntu 16.04.

The upgrade appeared to go without error.
And the above script did indeed get lirc installed OK.

The problem I noticed is that after the upgrade, lirc didn't work.
There was no /dev/lirc0 device.

After noticing a new /etc/lirc/lirc_options.conf file, I was able to get 
/dev/lirc0 to appear by changing the following lines:

[modinit]
code = /bin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none
code1 = /sbin/modprobe serial_ir


But still no response to the remote, or even irw.
But cat /dev/lirc0 *did* show data with each keypress on the remote, so 
that was promising.

After a bit of searching, I realized that there is a script with 
more-modern lirc called lirc-old2new.  But it errored out on me:

$ sudo /usr/share/lirc/lirc-old2new
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/share/lirc/lirc-old2new", line 247, in <module>
     main()
   File "/usr/share/lirc/lirc-old2new", line 234, in main
     options_conf = get_lircd_options(hardware_conf, etcdir)
   File "/usr/share/lirc/lirc-old2new", line 134, in get_lircd_options
     and hardware_cf['modules']:
KeyError: 'modules'


Apparently this script was looking for a MODULES= line in my 
hardware.conf file, which mine didn't have.   Adding it to my file 
allowed lirc-old2new to complete.   It created a 
lircd.conf.d/lirc-old.conf file with my remote settings.  But sadly now 
there's not even a /dev/lirc0 device anymore.  Good thing I saved a copy 
of my partially-working lirc_options.conf file from my step above.


In the end, lirc now works!  But it wasn't trivial.

1) Apparently in going from Ubuntu 16.04 -> 18.04 doesn't even result in 
a working lirc at all.   Stephen's script above takes care of this quite 
nicely.

2) Once you do get a working lirc, the upgrade doesn't actually 
configure it the way it was set up before.  Nobody wants to set up lirc 
from scratch again if it was already working before.  I was able to do 
this using what I described above.


I'm sharing this information in case somebody else is wondering about 
lirc after an OS upgrade.   FWIW, here's my lirc_options.conf file in 
its entirety:

-----

# These are the default options to lircd, if installed as
# /etc/lirc/lirc_options.conf. See the lircd(8) and lircmd(8)
# manpages for info on the different options.
#
# Some tools including mode2 and irw uses values such as
# driver, device, plugindir and loglevel as fallback values
# in not defined elsewhere.

[lircd]
nodaemon        = False
driver          = default
device          = auto
output          = /var/run/lirc/lircd
pidfile         = /var/run/lirc/lircd.pid
plugindir       = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lirc/plugins
permission      = 666
allow-simulate  = No
repeat-max      = 600
#effective-user =
#listen         = [address:]port
#connect        = host[:port]
#loglevel       = 6
#release        = true
#release_suffix = _EVUP
#logfile        = ...
#driver-options = ...

[lircmd]
uinput          = False
nodaemon        = False

[modinit]
code = /bin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none
code1 = /sbin/modprobe serial_ir
# code2 = ...


# [lircd-uinput]
# add-release-events = False
# release-timeout    = 200
# release-suffix     = _EVUP

-----



-WD