Okay, I installed Knoppmyth successfully, tweaked my PVR-500 to detect and work and everything looks okay except that I can't get my Silverstone VFD or iMon PAD remote to work. For some reason, the /etc/init.d/lirc script crashes (no error messages, it just won't start lircd) and I think this may be part of my problem. I did an apt-get remove lirc and installed the 0.8.0 stable version of LIRC, using the keyboard/mouse patch at http://venky.ws/projects/imon/. I'm running LCDproc with imon tweaks from the same page.

If I manually start lircd and use irw and mode2, everything registers and looks beautiful, so I know Linux is seeing my remote. My /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc and /etc/lircd.conf look fine but the eject button is the only thing that works inside or outside of mythfrontend (it's set up to use irexec, which i have to manually start all the time--is the /etc/init.d/lirc script supposed to start irexec or do I have to set it to autostart manually?).

I have followed instructions in the forums to change the /etc/init.d/lirc script to omit the last part of the start-stop-daemon line (start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec /usr/sbin/lircd \) to no effect.

I've double checked naming in /etc/lircd.conf and /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc to make sure that the buttons are valid and match and still no MythTV remote control love.

I have an extra hard drive with Windows ME installed, so I plugged that in to double check my hardware. Everything ran fine, so I know that the hardware isn't at fault. It's something in the Linux configuration.

Any pointers as to how to get lircd, irexec, or LCDproc to work correctly with my hardware would be greatly appreciated! I don't know what else to try...

System specs:
- Epox motherboard with VIA KT600 + VT8237 chipset (I know, try to stay away from VIA, but from what I've read the problems are mostly with earlier chipsets--this one has worked without a hitch so far)
- Sempron 2500+
- Hauppauge PVR-500
- 1 GB PC3200
- Soundblaster Live
- 250GB Seagate SATA hard drive (no flakiness--everything has worked great on the hard drive front)
- Antec True Power 430W power supply
- Samsung 16X DVD burner
- Silverstone LC20M case (with iMon VFD/PAD remote)

I didn't do this cause I wasn't aware of it. Can you point me to the corresponding post please?

I'm just setting up a new mythtv frontend box with VFD and iMon-PAD remote as well but it doesn't work for me too. When stopping GDM with "/etc/init.d/gdm stop" I can see my remote working when testing it using mode2. All in all this howto from the knoppmythwiki helped me a lot as well: http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LIRCHowTo.

However, I haven't got a working .lircrc reflecting the iMon PAD commands from lircd.conf right now. Thus I haven't got the remote working in mythfrontend yet. Maybe you have a suitable .lircrc?

Power on using the remote works great. But this has nothing to do with linux, lirc, etc. of course.

The VFD doesn't do anything until now. It remains just dead. When trying to start LCDd I get no errors. Doing a "ps x | grep LCD" returns nothing. So I assume LCDd isn't running at all. I followed the steps for LCDproc 0.4.5 for iMon (http://venky.ws/projects/imon) and for me it looked like everything went well... except that at the end it doesn't work.

What and where to look further?

I finally got fed up with tinkering and wiped my hard drive and started all over again. This time, I did an apt-get remove lirc and apt-get remove lcdproc from a clean Knoppmyth install. I installed the new versions of lcdproc and lirc from CVS (patch the imon driver, too--found at http://vorticon.no-ip.info/pub/patches/), ran modprobe lirc_dev and modprobe lirc_imon, chmod 666 /dev/lirc and for some reason it works fine now. I have remote control in MythTV! I just have to figure out how to get it to start up on boot and then it's VFD time.

I used lircd.conf and lircrc files obtained at http://vorticon.no-ip.info/pub/patches/.