Before you get started you will need a few things installed which this guide will not cover. First is WINE which will be used to run IR under linux.
Second you must have support for parallel ports in your kernel. The serial interface may also work but I have not been able to test this. The following shows which options are needed under a 2.6 kernel, they can be compiled in or installed as modules.
Parallel port support ---> <X> Parallel port support <X> PC-style hardware Character devices ---> <X> Support for user-space parallel port device drivers
Third you will need java installed, such as sun-jdk.
You will also need any utilities used in this guide which most installations will have already.
Make sure wine has been configured. If this is a new installation you can just run wine without any command line parameters so it creates the default configuration files. This was done using wine 20040716 so using an earlier version may not work the same. After this is done you are ready to proceed.
# Enter your wine configuration directory
cd ~/.wine
# Open "config" with your favorite editor
vi config
# Find the ppdev section and uncomment the proper line.
[ppdev]
;; key: io-base of the emulated port
;; value : parport-device{,timeout}
;; timeout for auto closing an open device ( not yet implemented)
"378" = "/dev/parport0"
;"278" = "/dev/parport1"
;"3bc" = "/dev/parport2"
# Save and exit your editor.
For later versions of wine which do not use the config file you must instead create the appropriate registry values using regedit, which should be provided by your wine installation.
You must create a string value inside of HKCU/Software/Wine/VDM/ppdev. If the appropriate keys do not exist you will have to create them. The name should be the io-base and the value should be the parport device. For example, a string named "378" with the value /dev/parport0. Note that winecfg may eventually be able to do this without having to touch regedit, but at the moment there is no option for it.
I have also found that in later versions of wine it is also necessary to tell wine to emulate Windows 98, or ME to get IR to work properly. You can use winecfg to set this on a per-application basis. For reference I am currently using wine 20050930.
Download IR, Remote Master, and the RDFs from the yahoo group.
Extract them like so:
# Version numbers are omitted! unzip RemoteMaster.zip -d remotemaster unzip IR.zip -d ir unzip RDFs_for_IR_and_RM_Version.zip -d rdf
After this is complete you are ready to try and start IR for the first time. Before you do this you must make sure /dev/parportX has the appropriate permissions. If not, you may need to change them. You will need read and write access. You also need to make sure wine recognizes the directory IR is in. Usually any location inside your home directory is fine however if that fails stick it inside your "fake_windows" or "drive_c" directory and you should be good.
cd ir wine ir.exe File > Set RDF Path (find the location of your RDFs) Interface > Check Interface
If that worked then you're almost done. Next is getting remote master to work.
cd ../remotemaster java -jar RemoteMaster.jar
Now that wasn't too hard was it? Again you must select the location of your RDF files but you should be good after that. You can create a file to start remote master easily (similar to rmaster.bat) by doing the following:
# Create a new file with your favorite editor vi rmaster # Put the following inside #!/bin/bash cd /path/to/remotemaster/directory/ java -jar RemoteMaster.jar # Save and exit your editor. # Make it executable. chmod 755 rmaster
That should be it! Enjoy.
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