PVR-150 IR Blaster on MythBuntu 10.04

For some reason I decided that I was going to upgrade my Mythbuntu system to 10.04 and that everything was going to go ok. Everytime I do this I regret it for at least a day because, for whatever reason, Ubuntu is hell-bent on making the Hauppauge PVR-150's IR-Blaster not work. It doesn't make much sense to me considering it is probably the most popular analog tuner card -- but whatever -- after lots of googling, cussing, and typing I have found the solution. I do have to say that aside from the PVR-150 issues the upgrade went pretty smooth with the exception of mythtv-backend not being reinstalled but that was fixed by "apt-get install mythtv-backend mythtv-database".

First of all, please note that this may not be a complete set of instructions if you are starting from scratch. To fill in the blanks please see my previous posts here and here. Secondly, thanks to everyone who did the bulk of the work: mrplow, Jarod, Jimmybondo and Mark as well as anyone I missed.

Ok, so you want your PVR-150 blasting IR codes on your Mythbuntu 10.04 system? First, if you're going to upgrade, back up your /etc/lirc/ directory as you'll likely just want to revert to your old configuration files. Once you do your upgrade, make sure everything is working (besides, of course, your IR blaster).

Here's what you'll want to do (it's virtually identical to 9.10 with a different file):

• sudo bash
  
• apt-get remove lirc-modules-source
  
• rm -rf /usr/src/lirc-0.8.6/
  
• apt-get install lirc-modules-source
  
• cd /usr/src/lirc-0.8.6
  
• wget http://bobkmertz.com/blog-files/zilog-for-lucid.diff
  
• patch -p0 < zilog-for-lucid.diff
• dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

Now you want to adjust your /etc/lirc files and make sure that hardware.conf references only 2 modules: lirc_dev lirc_zilog More information on those files can be found in my previous posts listed above. You'll also need to make sure that you have haup-ir-blaster.bin in your /lib/firmware/ directory (again, information on this can be found in my prior posts)

After you run all of the above commands you may want to go ahead and reboot the machine. For some reason it seems to take lirc_zilog a bit before it actually initializes and loads the firmware file which could result in seeing errors about unknown symbols.

As a side note, I am still running a 32bit kernel because I'm not seeing much of an indication that the PVR-150 will work under a 64 bit kernel (see comments of my prior posts). I haven't attempted it and really don't have much of a desire to even try -- it takes enough to just keep this stuff running with Ubuntu wanting to break the PVR-150 everytime someone sneezes.

Hopefully this post helps someone out and prevents them from missing Dr. Who like I did tonight.