Freevo

- User Documentation

# Hardware/StreamzapUSBRemote

Notice: I'm not sure when the patch went in, but the Streamzap has finally been included as a supported remote of the lirc project. This means no more patching! Simply follow the directions for installing from cvs ( http://lirc.org/cvs.html) and you should be good to go!! (May 5, 2005)

1. Intro
2. FC2
3. Lorenzo's Gentoo instructions

## Intro

The Streamzap USB Remote is a wonderful remote is available from thinkgeek.com and actually I bought mine at my local CompUSA. The remote is USB and works very nicely with the Streamzap patch to the lirc project.

The Streamzap USB patch to Lirc is available here http://sourceforge.net/projects/szremote/

Note that the diff will not patch correctly against the release version 0.6.6 you must patch against the CVS version. My binary reports a version numbe of 0.7.0pre1. So I'm assuming anything newer then this should be alright..

If anybody needs help with it, you may reach me at josh at engr dot arizona dot edu

## FC2

Below are the rough steps I used to get a Streamzap remote working on FC2 2.6.10. I did it a bit by trial and error, and the steps will reflect that. If someone can clean up the steps and make them more dircet, please do so.

1. Update your system to Kernel 2.6.10 if it is not already. You do NOT need the kernel sources!

2. Goto http://lirc.org/cvs.html and follow the directions there for checking out lirc.

3. Go to http://www.grangenet.net/~greg/streamzap.html and download the patch kit. Follow the instructions to patch lirc. It will fail on setup.sh. Look at the rejections and you'll see you simply need to add the text "streamzap" to two places in the file. Questions? send me a note: freevolist at desboroughs dot net. I have updated the patch to work against cvs as of 1/29/2005. You can get the updated patch here: http://www.desboroughs.net/streamzap/streamzap-lirc-cvs20050129-kernel-2.6.X-patch.gz

4. Now perform the ./autogen.sh and ./setup.sh steps

5. When confure runs, it will eventually die and say that you don't have the kernel sources installed. Now run this command: ./configure --with-kerneldir=/lib/modules/2.6.10-1.9_FC2/build/ --with-driver=streamzap

6. Run make and then make install

7. Shutdown the box (I plugged in my Streamzap at this point and crashed the system)

8. Plug in the streamzap "dongle" to a usb port

9. Boot the machine

10. Login, open a shell. You should be able to run lircd and then run irw. Press some buttons on the remote and hopefully you see your button presses reported back.

11. Now install freevo. Since I'm running RedHat I used yum for this. Unfortunately, yum also installed lirc 6 something and it whacked my functional lirc. We'll fix that in a minute.

12. Use yum to install mplayer (should probably be done before step 11, not after).

13. Installed lirc again (hey, I told you this was trial and error!) http://prdownloads.sf.net/freevo/lirc-0.7.0-1_fc2.i386.rpm

14. Installed pylirc: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freevo/pylirc-0.0.4-1_fc2.i386.rpm

15. Still could'nt get irw to work. If you are ever in this situation, run lircd with the -n option. Now run irw in a seperate console. You'll probably see lircd crash in the first console and print the reason while it died.

16. Get rid of old lirc: mv /dev/lirc /dev/lirc.old

17. Get rid of old lircd: mv /dev/lircd /dev/lircd.old

18. cd to your lirc src

19. Run make install

20. irw should now work again

21. Copy the file /usr/share/freevo/contrib/lirc/streamzap to /etc/freevo. Rename it to lircrc

22. Start freevo and enjoy your new remote control funtionality!

Again, please streamline the above as needed. I am a very novice linux user and probably went far out of my way on some of this stuff.

-Davin (feevolist at desboroughs dot net)

## Lorenzo's Gentoo instructions

Check your achitecture (i686, i386, etc) (uname -m will do the work) Download and install kernel image (apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.10-1-xxx) Download and install corresponding kernel headers (apt-get install kernel-headers-2.6.10-1-xxx) Configure your bootloader to use your new kernel ( for LILO you should add something like that to your /etc/lilo.conf image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10-1-686

- label=Linux-2.6.10 initrd=/boot/initrd.img-2.6.10-1-686

and then issue the command lilo)

Reboot your machine (from this time on, my Debian box started speaking deutsche...guess I did something wrecked) Now make a correct symlink to tell your box where to find stuff (ln -s /path/to/kernel-header /usr/src/linux The path will probably be /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.10-1-xxx) Download LIRC cvs ( cvs -z8 -d:pserver: anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lirc co lirc ) Download patch ( wget http://www.desboroughs.net/streamzap/streamzap-lirc-cvs20050129-kernel-2.6.X-patch.gz ) Now you should apply patch ( go to your lirc directory and copy there the patch, then issue gunzip -c http://www.desboroughs.net/streamzap/streamzap-lirc-cvs20050129-kernel-2.6.X-patch.gz | patch -p1 )

Issue autogen.sh and then setup.sh. Select USB Devices and the Streamzap Select save & configure Now make && make install Reboot your machine (kinda windoze)

When it comes up, open two terminals and launch lircd -n in one and irw in the second Push some buttons (world, my finger is on the button -push the button-) and you should see some output. Now add to your /etc/apt/sources-list the following two lines :

deb http://freevo.sourceforge.net/debian unstable main deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main

Launch apt-get update

Now install mplayer (apt-get install mplayer) Install Freevo (apt-get install freevo)

Ok, we're almost there... Now you need a file to configure the buttons on your remote. There is one in the source distribution of freevo, grab it ( wget http://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/freevo/freevo-1.5.3.tar.gz ) and unpack it (tar -zxvf freevo-1.5.3.tar.gz) The file you need should be contrib/lirc/streamzap. Copy it in /etc/freevo. Open your local_conf.py and add the line LIRCRC = '/etc/freevo/streamzap'

At this point, evrything was ok for me, except that only root was able to launch freevo without getting an error from lirc.py. Just permission crap, so go to your /dev/ directory and chmod 666 (the number of the beast) lirc and lircd.

Ok. At this point configure your freevo as usual, launch it and astonish all your media-center addicted friends !

This is,as far as I remember some beer and lotsa cofee later, a step-by-step. Lemme know if you lack something.

last edited 2005-05-06 13:31:45 by DavinDesborough
current version: http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/doc/Hardware/StreamzapUSBRemote