I’ve got an IR receiver plugged in to the serial port, which works with minimyth, but lircd keeps saying
Jan 2 18:33:32 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[2516]: caught signal
Jan 2 18:33:32 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[2516]: closing '/dev/lirc0'
Jan 2 18:33:32 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: lircd(devinput) ready, using /var/run/lirc/lircd
Jan 2 18:33:34 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd
Jan 2 18:33:34 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: initializing '/dev/lirc0'
Jan 2 18:33:34 theboxhd lircd-0.8.6[3144]: can't get exclusive access to events coming from `/dev/lirc0' interface
so I followed the instructions at http://www.lirc.org/html/devinput.html to make HAL ignore the IR device (in fact it will ignore any serial device) by creating the following in a new file called /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe/10-ignore-lirc.fdi:






true


(after getting clues about what key to use from lshal).
Restarting hal and running lshal confirms that HAL is now ignoring the IR device.
Restarting lirc … gives the same result as before. It still doesn’t have exclusive access to /dev/lirc0. Even after a reboot.