Our remote control has been working fine with my Mythbuntu setup for a while now, but there are a few things I would like to work better. Volume is one of those thing. Lirc controls the volume differently between Hulu Desktop and the built-in video player. It is a little annoying.

So, after a little Googling, this thread sparked my interest in Gizmod.

Installing…

To install it on my system, I followed the Ubuntu directions. That calls for installing via the repositories:

sudo apt-get install gizmod

Next, I had to address the UDev / Security. First, that means creating an “input” group:

sudo groupadd -f input
sudo gpasswd -a username input

Then, I added the following lines to /etc/udev/rules.d/99-input.rules:

KERNEL=="event*",       NAME="input/%k", MODE:="660", GROUP="input"
KERNEL=="js*",          NAME="input/%k", MODE:="664", GROUP="input"

Then, to make the changes take effect, I ran:

sudo service udev restart

Here’s the problem. When I tried to start gizmod, I got this error:

GizmoDaemon v3.4 -=- (c) 2007, Tim Burrell <tim.burrell@gmail.com>=---------=
Unable to Initialize Gizmod :: User Script dir [/usr/etc/gizmod/modules.d] does NOT exist or permissions are wrong!
GizmoDaemon Shut Down.

Recompiling

I found a bug report that seemed to suggest that maybe recompiling from the source might fix the problem. So, here is what I did.

So, I downloaded the latest version from the Download Page. Then, here’s the command to unzip:

tar -xjvf gizmod-3.5.tar.bz2

cd gizmod-3.5/

Installing dependencies

The easiest way to make sure that you have all the dependencies is with apt-get. Otherwise, you need to check the documentation and manually go through the list installing all the programs.

sudo apt-get build-dep gizmod

Then, continuing on, I followed the instructions and ran CMake.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc ../../gizmod-3.5

make

The make command failed with this error:

skp@gabriel:~/Downloads/gizmod-3.5/build$ make
[ 29%] Built target H
[ 31%] Building CXX object libGizmod/CMakeFiles/Gizmod.dir/CPUUsage.o
/home/skp/Downloads/gizmod-3.5/libGizmod/CPUUsage.cpp: In constructor ‘Gizmod::CPUUsageInfo::CPUUsageInfo()’:
/home/skp/Downloads/gizmod-3.5/libGizmod/CPUUsage.cpp:83: error: ‘memset’ was not declared in this scope
make[2]: *** [libGizmod/CMakeFiles/Gizmod.dir/CPUUsage.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [libGizmod/CMakeFiles/Gizmod.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

I found a fix online. The fix was to add #Include <cstring>:

Then, it worked. Everything compiled with no problem.

Lastly, I finished the compile/install with:

sudo make install

Now, I haven’t used it very much. I think I need to do some configuring and hacking to get it to do what I want it to. Currently, it doesn’t seem to do well with Hulu Desktop.