CaptureIR with Linux

StephenR0 · Post by **StephenR0** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 12:06 pm

I've been using CaptureIR with a simple parallel jp1 interface with the CaptureIR hardware added to it for some time now. I'm very happy with the way it works. But I'd like to move to Linux. Has anyone managed to get this to work in any way with Linux? The driver doesn't seem to be compatible with Wine and VirtualBox doesn't support the parallel port. Ideally, if the driver portion could be supported natively in Linux, it would work just like it does in Windows. Is there any chance this is an option?

Steve

StephenR0 · Post by **StephenR0** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 5:26 pm

I shouldn't answer my own question, but I did finally get it to work with Wine after installing a Windows version of Java 5. Other than that, configuring the Wine registry and configuring Wine to emulate Windows 98 seemed be the key.

Steve

johnsfine · Post by **johnsfine** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 5:29 pm

I haven't tried wine yet, but plan to. I'd love to have CaptureIR working on my Linux system, but assumed it would be hard.

Do you have any more details of what you did to make it work?

gfb107 · Post by **gfb107** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 5:46 pm

We've been able to create a shared library for the jp1 parallel port for RMIR, so it should be possible to do the same for CaptureIR. Then you wouldn't need wine.

StephenR0 · Post by **StephenR0** » Fri Mar 20, 2009 6:06 pm

I spent some time doing this on a machine that has a relatively virgin install of Ubuntu 8.10 to make sure that I knew what all was required. From my experience, I think this document is pretty accurate:

http://www.hifi-remote.com/jp1/ir_rm_linux.html

So here's what I did:

o Install wine. I use the development version which is 1.1.17 currently.

o Create the registry entry for the parallel port.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\VDM\ppdev]
"378"="/dev/parport0"

This is for a normally configured parallel port.

o Make sure you can access /dev/parport0. I just added my account to the lp group. Log out and back in to get access.

o Configure wine to emulate Windows 98.

Once wine is configured, the key for CaptureIR is to install Windows Java 5 with wine. Then run CaptureIR with a similar command to Windows.

wine java -jar CaptureIR.jar

On one machine I had some trouble with the window refreshing, but I just resized each time I needed to fix it. That might be a Compiz issue.

So that's it. If you have any questions, I can try to help.

Steve