[mythtv-users] lircd dead but subsys locked - solved

Jeff Bevis digijock223 at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 11 22:23:31 UTC 2006


I had considerable trouble getting lirc working the first time.  Now, 
upon setting up my second frontend, I find that I'm having the same woe 
yet again.  Since I obviously forgot what I learned before, and it's 
apparently not easy to find the answer, I'm going to post my resolution 
to the problem here for others who have the same frustration.

With a fresh install of lirc 0.8.1 under Fedora Core 5, running "irw" 
gives me the dreaded "lircd dead but subsys locked" bailout message.  
Needless to say it doesn't work with Myth, either.  To remedy, you need 
to change two things; 

Change contents of /etc/udev/rules.d/lirc.rules to:
    KERNEL="lirc[0-9]*", NAME="lirc/%n"

Change contents of /etc/sysconfig/lircd:
    # Options to lircd
    LIRCD_OPTIONS="--device=/dev/lirc/0"

Also, make sure the top of your /etc/modprobe.conf looks something like 
this (assuming you use a serial IR receiver):
    alias char-major-61 lirc_serial
    options lirc_serial irq=4 io=0x3f8
    install lirc_serial /bin/setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none ; 
/sbin/modprobe --ignore-install lirc_serial

Apparently, lircd is trying to find "/dev/lirc" by default, and that 
doesn't exist.  The default lirc.rules in udev doesn't match up either 
way, so the above example should get you consistent.

Hope this saves someone else a little pain.

-Jeff



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