Monday, January 17, 2011

IrDA/Infrared working on hp compaq nx7000 series with Ubuntu

The nx7000 hp compaq series has a FIR (Fast IrDA).
Although the device is detected, its default configuration in Ubuntu yields an IRQ conflict with the Parallel port on IRQ7. Besides, the BIOS does not initialize this chip, and therefore it must be so by software.

In order to achieve all that, I wrote these small guidelines, compiled from a scarce set of results.

4.10. IrDA

The nx7010 has a FIR (Fast IrDA) port that supports speeds up to 4 Mbps. The smsc-ircc2 module that supports it is experimental and not included in the default Fedora kernel, so you'll have to set the SMC_IRCC_FIR kernel option, and recompile the kernel. The only problem is that the BIOS does not initialize this chip, so you'll need the SMCINIT utility to do this for you.

To get this to work you first need to download and compile tosh1800-smcinit according to the instructions given on the linked page.

  • Install irda-utils and setserial packages.

The /etc/sysconfig/irda file should look like this:

IRDA=yes DEVICE=irda0 DISCOVERY=yes 

To /etc/modprobe.conf add the following lines:

install smsc-ircc2 /usr/local/sbin/tosh1800-smcinit; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install smsc-ircc2 alias irda0 smsc-ircc2 

Now you can start IrDA as root via irattach irda0.

DEBUG: Try (re)start ir-util service and check the contents of dmesg