Remapping RaspBMC Remote Keybindings

I've updated my HTPC to be a Raspberry Pi that uses RaspBMC as the OS. The really hard part was integrating my existing RAID with the device (over USB) to serve up my media; that's a subject for another post.

Something that didn't quite work out of the RaspBMC box (and to be fair A LOT did work) was the Context Menu for XBMC. I like to call it the "right click" option if I was using a mouse. This was because my remote didn't have the default button that XBMC was expecting. As mentioned in a previous post I have a generic RC6 IR receiver that I had used the mceusb2 kernel driver. Looking at the remote config file for XBMC (/opt/xbmc-bcm/xbmc-bin/share/xbmc/system/keymaps/remote.xml) the ContextMenu is mapped to the <title> key. Looking in the LIRC config file for XBMC (/opt/xbmc-bcm/xbmc-bin/share/xbmc/system/Lircmap.xml) for a mceusb remote the "title" is mapped to the "Guide" key. Looking on my trusty remote diagram there was a Guide button, but why didn't it bring up the context menu?

Turns out that RaspBMC was using a different remote config in Lircmap.xml Using irw to see the remote codes I get:

16d 0 KEY_EPG devinput
16d 0 KEY_EPG_UP devinput

Searching Lircmap.xml for devinput I got a different <remote> profile, with no mapping for <title> So I added:

<title>KEY_EPG</title>

and the Context Menu is displayed.

Handy little util irw for figuring out remote config.

Ubuntu continues to impress me

The story so far is that my wife's been needing a new laptop. We've slowly been watching her Dell (which was an el cheapo she got ~6 years ago) die. A USB port here, the wireless doing random things there. We've been impressed at how long it held out, but I'm cheap a bargain hunter, and wanted to get something at a good price that's also Linux compatible. Here in Oz Lenovo's having a massive clearance sale. I'd been contemplating a Lenovo because they are pretty rock solid.

This is where the story gets better. I'm sure that every Linux user has had difficulty with hardware drivers. Either the company doesn't make them (eg: some Dell Printers), the drivers are buggy (and being closed source you can't fix it - or google for someone that has), and you just end up pulling out your hair.

Canonical as part of the efforts to reach out to the business world have been certifying hardware configurations. They've been in cahoots with Lenovo to certify laptop models, and low and behold the model I was interested in is 100% Ubuntu compliant.

So I picked up a ThinkPad Edge E520 1143AJ1. Nice i5 processor, integrated graphics (for the occasional game of StarCraft that she likes to play), anti-glare screen (which I had to pay extra for on my MacBook Pro cause Apple are jerks).

It's perhaps not the most stylish of machines, but we can live with that. I was surprised by the weight. It feels lighter than it's actual stated weight, but that's a win I think. The first thing I noticed when booting it up was how SLOW it was!!! This machine is meant to be snappy Lenovo, but you weighted it down with a tonne of bricks. It didn't come with recovery disks, but a recovery partition. Not wanting to lose the 15GB, I burned that to a series of DVDs, then booted up Ubuntu 12.04.

I'm not sure how you can make an installer better over time (I was impressed with earlier versions), but the one thing I noticed especially was the installation of packages onto the system while I was filling out configuration dialogs. Multitasking to the max. The partioning dialog has received some polish since I last did a Ubuntu install so I was able to carve up the HD properly. As a note the Ubuntu documentation has also been improved, so I was able to quickly find the recommended partition sizes and adjust accordingly to need.

Out popped a new computer! Booted it up and everything worked (not surprising really). Configuring system settings was a breeze, and I've noticed some UI similarities to OSX which I don't mind but I wonder how the lawyers feel about that. The boot time was so quick (even for a non SSD) that I don't think I ever want to see Windows 7 again.

So far all is well, but I really wanted to commend Canonical for the constant innovations they're making in Linux/user integration. I'm a Gentoo hacker (when I can these days) and love to play around with config to get an optimal system. But my wife is your "typical" user. She's not going to be rendering video; where some additional CPU flags to ffmpeg during compile can make a significant difference to transcoding time. She's not going to be compiling code, or any other task that requires significant CPU resources. It's email, web browsing, office documents - the usual suspects. I expect the most significant thing the CPU will do is Javascript processing, or the odd game here and there. So having a Linux distro that's easy to obtain, installs quickly and just works out of the box is just so awesome, and inspiring for the future of computing. Hopefully Ubuntu can continue to make serious inroads into communities and thus convert more people to the joys of Linux.

Holidaying with Android Froyo

Over the Christmas break, my wife wants to do some traveling. Which is all good and well, except that I have some coding that I want to. I'm sure that a lot people experience this problem.

My biggest annoyance was the lack of internet to look up API docs/reference material on the road for some tech that I want to dabble with. So I considered getting a 3G wireless modem.

Last week, my HTC Magic got upgraded to Froyo (2.2.1 actually), which of course comes with the ability to tether via USB to my computer. A quick google found instructions on how to enable the tethering on Gentoo Linux. A quick kernel config and module compile; followed by some bash scripting to modprobe cdc_ether, rndis_host and usbnet - and I had a usb0 interface sitting next to my eth0 interface. DHCP takes care of getting an IP address from the phone and I'm connected. If you're a Gentoo user, you should symlink /etc/init.d/net.lo to /etc/init.d/net.usb0 like net.eth0 for a convenient startup/shutdown script. One of the best bits is that the phone charges off the USB as well so I'm not draining the battery.

I even used my tethered connection to load Vodafone's coverage map for where we're going to show to my wife. Though knowing Vodafone the best laid USB tethering plans of mice and men are oft to go awry

Progress on Evergreen open source drivers

In my HTPC I'm using a Radeon 5450; but since the 5450 is based on the Evergreen chipset I've been using the propriety drivers (x11-drivers/ati-drivers). Not a fan.

However since the Linux Kernel 2.6.34 release, it appears that progress is really coming along on the open source drivers (see point 1.11 in the link). I look forward to ditching flgrx soon. :)

Linux Firefox 3.6.3 Tab Behaviour fixed

Something that's been annoying me for a while is how Firefox 3.6.3 on Linux now opens tabs next to the current tab you are in, instead of the far right.

This guy fixed it

Awesome

Autostarting HTPC

As mentioned I've got a dummy user set up on my HTPC box (tvuser) that needs to autologin when the machine boots up. Reading this gave me an overview of what needed to be done. I edited my /etc/inittab to change

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux

to

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 -l /sbin/autologin.sh -n
tty1 linux

where /sbin/autologin.sh looks like

#! /bin/bash
exec login -f tvuser

Note that the inittab entry should all be on one line (I had to put a line break in there for formatting), and the autologin script has root permissions, so only the bootup sequence (or me as root) can execute it. I previously was using fluxbox as my window manager since that's what I use on my laptop, however it was time to get XBMC going.

 emerge -vDp xbmc

did the trick. I then altered tvuser's .xinitrc to contain the line

exec xbmc

To make sure that X is started when tvuser (auto)logins, I set the following in tvuser's .bashrc

if [ "`tty`" = "/dev/tty1" ] ; then
  startx
fi

The conditional helps because when I was debugging some config by sshing into the HTPC as the tvuser user, X kept trying to start. The conditional has X only start of the tty value is /dev/tty1 which only happens as boot time.

The remote works so far with XBMC, however I haven't tried anything too exotic.

The boot process is a bit slow for my liking. I've got some other boxes that could do with a boot boost, so I'll probably take the time now to research how to reduce the bootup time of my Gentoo boxes.

cat /dev/lirc0 > brain (getting LIRC working)

Due to lacking some hardware, I've postponed the connection of the HTPC box to the telly. So I thought I'd conquer the remote control problem. When I bought my laptop I got given a whole bunch of stuff that I thought I'd never use. Part of which was a remote control and an IR receiver. Very handy now. I looked up the LIRC Gentoo Wiki to get some idea of what I was needing to do. Turns out it wasn't so simple. My IR receiver plugs into the USB port, so I thought I would use the devinput LIRC_DEVICES option. Turns out that was a bad idea. I couldn't get irw to ouput any codes. I thought that maybe it was because I had a very empty mapping section in my /etc/lirc.conf So I tried using irrecord. That didn't work either. irrecord kept informing me that I wasn't pushing the button when my finger and the two red LEDs on the remote and the receiver seemed to suggest otherwise.

My next thought was that there was a problem with the USB subsystem. So I checked I had all the right stuff in the kernel. Tick. So I googled around for how to find out what's connected to the USB. Handy little program lsusb. It told me that I had a "Philips eHome Infrared Receiver". Checking the dmesg logs at /var/log/dmesg showed nothing wrong with the USB side of things. So what was going on?

Google once more to the rescue! Turns out that I had compiled the wrong LIRC driver (or no driver at all). Changing my LIRC_DEVICES to mceusb2 (and reemerging lirc) compiled the correct driver /lib/modules/2.6.31-gentoo-r6/misc/lirc_mceusb2.ko modprobing lirc_mceusb2 created /dev/lirc0 Testing it via irw I got some results

000000037ff07be9 00 Play mceusb

All that was left was adding the kernel module to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6, and adding lircd to the default startup sequence and I was done. A quick reboot to ensure that everything worked from the get go, and I had a working remote control. Turns out the running etc-update after reemerging lirc updated my /etc/lirc.conf with a config file for generic RC-6 remote; which is handy because on the bottom of the remote it's labelled "RC6" ;). It's nice that the ebuild for lirc copies the config for you upon install. Not hard to do it myself, but I like the ebuild doing the heavy lifting for me :)

Now I have to do some config to make sure that apps can respond to those bathroom break pauses during the extended Lord Of The Rings sessions :p

Update: next time I should check the Hardware4Linux site. Might save me some troubles.

I do not think that word means what you think it means

Ah the joys of tracking down documentation, help, and that tiny bit of information that makes it all click :)

I got a base Gentoo Linux install onto my HTPC box, with kernel version 2.6.31 That was the easy bit. The hard bit is figuring out how to get my video card drivers running.

Gentoo is great with the helper guides it provides, and if any doco writers read this - keep at it. The Hardware 3D Acceleration Guide and The X Server Configuration HOWTO guides have been very useful. However there are a few things to note that weren't apparent to me straight away; and that I burned some time away on. The first is the keyword differences between the propriety ATI drivers (from here on referred to as fglrx) and the open source drivers. Two are provided 'radeon' and 'radeonhd'.

In Gentoo to specify the drivers for X, you edit the VIDEO_CARDS property in your /etc/make.conf However adding radeon and radeonhd will get you the open source drivers. Pretty obvious now, but without knowing how the keyword fglrx aligns to my Radeon 5450 video card, I went down the wrong path for a bit. Easy to recover from. I updated the kernel to rip out all references to video card drivers, and DRM. I unemerged all the unneeded x11-drivers packages and updated the VIDEO_CARDS flag to contain fglrx vesa. The vesa keyword is handy for a plain old backup driver. Ran an

emerge -vDNu world

and all is well. To make sure that the fglrx module was loaded at boot, I added fglrx to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

The next problem came with trying to get X running. Can't watch those DVDs without it :). It's nice that the writers have added in the relevant steps for getting HAL working with X (the Xorg package in particular). When I first upgraded to Xorg 1.6 on my laptop, all the input devices stopped working, and Xorg 1.6 passes the management of that stuff to HAL. I guess I'll have to be careful when that all moves into udev.

Running the

Xorg -configure

command didn't work. I kept getting this error.

(WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance
(BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found

After some searching on the Gentoo forums I found this helpful post outlining that

Since your using the ati-drivers , don't use Xorg -configure , you
want to run 'aticonfig --initial' ... That will set up
your xorg.conf the way fglrx needs it.

So ATI couldn't play nice and do things the same way the rest of the community does it? I ran it and got a basic xorg.conf I'll have to do more work to polish it off, but I'll soon have X running (I hope).

I got thinking to myself, why should I bother with the propriety drivers since there seems to be a decent community around the open source version. Maybe I should ditch fglrx and go with radeonhd. Alas I don't think I can. According to Wiki the 5450 uses the Evergreen chipset, and it seems that the radeon and radeonhd drivers aren't there yet; which I can understand given that the chipset is new.

Now all I need is to get X to work on the TV properly and I can move on to XBMC.

Let the HTPC games begin

I had to wait a couple of weeks for my Video Card to arrive. I called most major vendors around and they all gave me the same time frame. There must have been a cargo container sitting on the docks with everyone's card in it :p

It arrived in the mail yesterday, and I plugged it in and turned on the machine for the first time. It didn't have any onboard video so I had to wait for the card. But now I'm off and running; installing Gentoo as my OS. I then plan to install the Radeon drivers and setup all the power saving features like the AMD CPU 'Cool n Quiet' to stop my power bill going through the roof.

I'm glad it's Saturday tomorrow :)

So you want that new Video Card

Something I'm planning on doing is making my own home theater PC. I've also got some code that takes a while to compile so I can double the box as a massive compiler to make use of those extra CPU cycles. My old man has recently upgraded, and I got his old box. However he decided to keep his video card. I've been looking at the Radeon 5450 since it's been getting some great reviews as a HTPC card.

However I'm planning to use XBMC as my front end, on a Gentoo Linux OS. So I need Linux drivers. Are they listed on the AMD drivers page. Nope. Does googling around find them. Nope.

I did find a review of the card which was benchmarked under Ubuntu. So after some posting on the forums turns out that the Catalyst driver bundle will work with the card.

I have yet to buy the card, so I can't say for sure. But I do feel a lot more confident now.

Oh and AMD - please actually update your release notes when you put out new cards. If it's not in the release notes under the supported cards section, then how are consumers meant to know other than trial and error.