frontend

Well, it turns out that I'm a moron.  Apparently everything was pretty much working for me already.  I had all of the pieces, I just didn't put them together correctly.  After days of work I finally have LIRC recognizing my remote inputs properly.  Basically what happened is that I configured the startup script for LIRC to load the correct driver for my IR receiver with the correct device and the correct parameters.  I had the correct config file being used to interpret the key presses correctly.  I had it all.  The problem was that I was doing all of my testing by launching the LIRC daemon from the command line instead of via the startup script that I had configured so none of my tweaks were being taken [facepalm].  Needless to say, after verifying this by running the command line with all of the correct parameters and then again verifying by rebooting the system and having it launch automatically, the remote control is now being properly identified and controlled via LIRC.  I can now launch irw and see all of my key presses as they happen.

At this point there seem to be only a few tweaks left to make before the system is ready for use again.  First, I need to setup the MythTV frontend application to automatically launch at login.  Next, I need to make MythTV always appear on top of the screen; it is currently being covered with the top and bottom panels of the window manager.  Finally, I need to configure the LIRC configuration file to interpret the button presses and pass them to the various applications, like MythTV.  Once I've got that in place, I think that all of the major components will be in place and I can put the unit back into service.  Yay.

Today I spent a while poking at the frontend again.  If you will remember from yesterday the changeover didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped for.  When I turned on the frontend I was greeted with a black screen.  Eventually I was able to get to a command line but didn't get any further before going to bed.  After looking at a couple of things and trying to start X Windows manually I realized that I had forgotten to install the AMD graphics driver.  Once that was done I could get the system to boot into X Windows normally.  Mythfrontend started up just like it was supposed to and this quickly brought to light the next thing that I forgot to do - setup the remote control!  

Tomorrow I will begin looking at the remote control receiver and see if I can get that running.   Hopefully that will be as simple to get running also.  It's always gone fairly smoothly in the past but it's been a couple of years since I last did it so I may be a little bit rusty.  We'll see.  Until next time...