infra-red remotes in GNOME 3

gnome-lirc-properties has served its purpose. It will probably carry on working on GNOME 3 desktops, but you won't be happy when it drags in GTK+ 2.x Python bindings, HAL or doesn't integrate into the new control-center.

But things have changed since gnome-lirc-properties was first written, and the way to handle IR remotes has changed as well:

• A large majority of receivers are now supported in the kernel using rc-core (né ir-core).
• Some receivers aren't supported (iguanaIR amongst others), and some need porting from pure input drivers to rc-core. Some functionality for the ATI Remote Wonder remotes is also not supported by the new drivers. If you're interested in working on this, drop a mail to the LIRC list.
• Mauro Chehab is making progress at propagating the key events from the kernel up to the stack to X11 applications. There's some patches in that direction on the Red Hat Bugzilla.

This means that:

• Event delivery would still need a broker in the session, to get to unfocused applications. gnome-settings-daemon can step in that role (and step out of the way when the application is focused, so the app can bring context dependent behaviour). gnome-settings-daemon already handle some of the more common multimedia keys in its media-keys plugin.
• The only configuration one would need to do is selecting the type of remote for the receiver, eventually tweaking the keymap for that remote.

So to write a replacement for gnome-lirc-properties that would fit into GNOME 3, one would need:

• A way to enumerate receivers on the machine
• A way to change the remote configuration (changing the keymap) for that receiver
• Eventually a way to tweak the keymap

This could all be handled through a D-Bus version of ir-keytable. If Mauro's patches reach X.org mainstream, then a kernel/GNOME summer of code project could be had for this work. Best to start writing some kernel patches, or laying some code if you want to get a headstart.

PS: For completeness' sake, there are also "pure" input devices that are remotes that wouldn't be handled through this. Those would need to be blacklisted in the input layer, and handled through rc-core instead.

More on remotes and receivers

After receiving a load of new remotes last week, it was only fair I hacked on gnome-lirc-properties and fixed a number of the long-standing bugs, and release gnome-lirc-properties 0.5.0.

So, what happened

Before the 0.5.0 release, we had a very small number of remotes and receivers combination declared, and unless you owned a receiver and remote that the developers did, you had to select your receiver/remote combination by hand.

Johannes Schmid fixed half of that problem by creating a script that'll go through the lirc sources to add all those remotes to our remotes list. I fixed up a number of bugs, added quirks, and support for parsing user-space drivers.

With that, we went from around 10 remotes/receivers combinations to just short of a hundred.

What's next

ir-core work is ongoing in the kernel, and will provide drivers for a number of receivers with a default keymap. That means that things will work as soon as you plug them in.

A number of receivers also already have input drivers, one level down from ir-core, and work out of the box, such as the ati_remote and appleir drivers.

As we can receive events from the remotes, we just need to funnel them to the desktop. That'll be the work of lircd in the short-term, until XKB2 shows up.

Can I help?

Sure you can. Plug in your receiver, launch gnome-lirc-properties and report whether the receiver is not auto-detected, or whether no remote is selected by default. You can also get me one of the listed remotes on this Amazon wishlist :)

My new toys

Thanks to Openismus and Fluendo for sending me 7 new remotes. I guess it means I need to start helping Jarod make all those remotes work using the input layer now :)

Hardware enablement

Patches flying, and the results are nearly there.

Driver for the Apple Infra-red Receiver should soon be upstream (and a patch not to break LIRC setups), along with support for the Intuos 4 wireless tablet.

Ross merged patches in Gypsy which should allow for crappy serial GPSes to work, as well as the one on the Nokia N810 (and N900?), and the (even) crappy(er) ones that require a closed-source daemon and write to a FIFO.

Multimedia Remotes support

After the Fedora QA day, working on gnome-lirc-properties and LIRC itself for the new Fedora 10 feature, fixing bugs with Sir Jarod Wilson at the testing, I did a release of gnome-lirc-properties.

The great thing to come out of it was a troubleshooting guide.

So if you had any problems using LIRC, or gnome-lirc-properties in the past, I would advise you to get the latest Fedora Rawhide (an updated Fedora 10 beta will do), and go through the guide!

LIRC setup! (now in Fedora)

If you have an infra-red remote control, you can now use gnome-lirc-properties, available in Fedora Rawhide. There were quite a few changes and upstream fixes required to make it work, which makes this change blog-worthy.





Thanks to Murray and Mathias for the help getting the changes in upstream.