irda tools

[Cef]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004 04:19, Pierfrancesco Caci wrote:
> Yes, gnokii dies quite often. irda-utils are ok, but I have been able
> to use my nokia phone with a 2.4.x kernel only, I could not figure out
> how to get a 2.6 to work (this is on debian sid with a kernel compiled
> by me from kernel.org sources). I'll try in a few days with universe's
> packages and let you know if I succeed.

I had issues at first (this is sid I'm talking about, but universe should be 
identical), but managed to get it to succeed after a bit of trial and error. 
Things have improved a bit with irda-utils since 2.6 was released and I 
originally tried, so this is now a bit easier. I've tested this today on a 
sid box, so it's current info. 

1. If you're using a kernel dongle module (for FIR mode, recommended if 
possible), you should make sure that the DEVICE setting 
in /etc/default/irda-utils is set to irda0, and NOT a serial or USB port. Do 
NOT add the kernel module to the DONGLE setting, as that is for irda-utils 
internal dongles, which I've never had luck with. You should then add your 
kernel dongle module to /etc/modules so it's loaded at startup. And 
regardless of wether you're using a kernel dongle module or not, make sure to 
set the SETSERIAL setting to the serial port the irda dongle is on.

2. If you want to do FIR, you need to know what chip/module your irda dongle 
supports. Use 'findchip -v'. This doesn't tell you what kernel module you 
should actually be loading, but it gives you all the details you need to 
figure out which one is right for you. If we wanted to do autodetection, we 
will probably need some sort of map of kernel modules to dongle chips. Once 
we have said mapping, autodetection should be pretty trivial to do.

3. For debugging, or even seeing if your phone/pda registers as alive, 
irdadump is your friend. If you run irdadump and get nothing, then it's not 
set up right. You should get regular stuff as your computer should be trying 
to auto-advertise it's ir-capable-ness. Note that this may be considered a 
security issue by some, so you way want to ask the user if they want IR 
support enabled (only after detecting they actually have it of course).

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net