LIRC and Hauppauge PVR-150 on OpenSuSE 11.0

Well, despite what’s been said elsewhere, it IS possible! It’s a bit error-ridden at first, but here is the procedure that I used to compile and install the PVR-150 patched LIRC 0.8.3-CVS.

First, Download the tarball mentioned in the Version 3 blog post at Marks Braindump. You can pretty much follow his instructions on the installation in the blog post, with some changes that are specific to getting it to compile on OpenSuSE 11.

1. First, remove all traces of the OpenSuSE LIRC from you system. Uninstall the RPMS and everything else that goes with them. Then unload all of the kernel modules, especially lirc_i2c (if you have it loaded).
2. In your kernel source directory, run make oldconfig && make prepare.
3. In your kernel source directory, run make prepare scripts which, among other things, compiles the required genksyms scurript.
4. I was getting a compile error like “WARNING: Symbol version dump /usr/src/`uname -r`/Module.symvers is missing”. Find out which kernel you’re running (uname -r). In yout kernel source directory, copy your Module.symvers file from /usr/src/linux-obj. I was running i386 architecture with the “default” kernel, so mine was located at /usr/src/linux-obj/i386/debug/Module.symvers. Copy that into /usr/src/linux.
5. In the lirc (patched) directory, run setup.sh as instructed. DO NOT tell it to run configure - just save settings and exit.
6. Edit the generated configure.sh file, adding a --with-kerneldir=/usr/src/KERNELDIR, replacing KERNELDIR with the actual path to your kernel soruce (i.e. /usr/src/`uname -r`).
7. make. If no errors, make install.
8. I decided to reboot at this point, and when I did, everything worked perfectly.

Also, I found that I needed to explicitly specify --device=/dev/lirc0 when starting LIRC, as well as not specifying a driver. I just took the /etc/init.d/lirc from the official OpenSuSE 11.0 package, commented out line 108 in makeargs() that adds the -H $LIRC_DRIVER to the args, and added LIRC_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0" to the top after the INIT info.

Unfortunately, figuring out this process took me a long time. I’ve reconstructed these instructions from various post-it notes, the whiteboard next to my desk, and some bash history files and terminal dumps. If this doesn’t seem to work for you, please drop an email to jason AT jason antman DOT com, with as much information as you have, and I’ll figure it out and update the instructions.

Now, finally, an up-to-date system AND MythTV.