IRDA on Mandrake

Running Mandrake on a Toshiba Libretto notebook, the FIR controller was not fully supported after installation. The controller is supported by the toshoboe kernel module and some minor changes to the init.d and sysconfig scripts were all that was required. The following solution has only been tested for my libretto, but it should work for most Toshiba notebooks and possibly with other FIR controllers as well. Please e-mail me with any issues / solutions so I can update this page.

The first thing to do was set up the configuration file, which is found at /etc/sysconfig/irda, mine reads as follows:

IRDA=yes
DEVICE=irda0
#DONGLE=actisys+
DISCOVERY=yes

For more information on what these options please visit the IRDA howto by clicking here. The second change required is to the start and stop functions in the IRDA init script found at /etc/init.d/irda. The output of (just that part of) my file is below:

  start)
        # Attach irda device 
        gprintf "Starting IrDA: "
	ifconfig ${DEVICE} up
        daemon /usr/sbin/irattach ${DEVICE} ${ARGS}
	touch /var/lock/subsys/irda
        echo
        ;;
  stop)
        # Stop service.
        gprintf "Shutting down IrDA: "
	killproc irattach
	rm -f /var/lock/subsys/irda
        echo
        ;;

The ifconfig line will probably have to be added and other lines may need to be as well. The set-up is now complete, to start up the irda service, type as root:

# /etc/init.d/irda restart

Restart rather than start will attempt to close down any existing irda setup. If this comes back with OK, then you can test the device with following command (also as root):

# irdadump

If the set-up is correct then you should see identity output packets from the computer's IRDA controller and also any other controllers that are pointing at it. IRDA is now configured as a service so it can also be stopped and started and configured to start at boot within Mandrake Control Center.

You will now be able to use the device /dev/ircomm0 as a serial port for ppp connections and for any other programs that use the IRDA, for instance gnokii.

If you use APM (hibernate etc..) then you will need to make sure that the IRDA service is stopped before you hibernate and restarted when the computer is restarted. I decided to class IRDA with the PCMCIA controller and so I added the following line to /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/suspend.d/4pcmcia

/etc/init.d/irda stop

And the following line to /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/resume.d/5pcmcia

/etc/init.d/irda restart

Now, hopefully you should have a happy IRDA setup