infrared beam support?

Forum: System
Topic: infrared beam support?
started by: xxooss

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Posted by xxooss on Jan. 18 2006,15:21

I was wondering if it is possible to get the infrared working with DSL on a Dell laptop? It's a Lattitude C610. I have a need to be able to use it to beam some info to a pda device I have lost the PC serial data cable for .

Thanks and if this is the wrong place for this post please move an I appologize.

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Posted by tempestuous on Jan. 29 2006,05:33

You need two things - the modules, and the utilities.
Most laptops have an IrDA chip made by SMC or NSC.  DSL already has the driver modules for these (smc-ircc.o & nsc-ircc.o)
So first you need to load and configure your module ... this can be somewhat complex.  There is a good howto here -
< http://tuxmobil.org/Infrared-HOWTO/Infrared-HOWTO.html >

Your IrDA device is seen as a serial device (usually /dev/ttyS2 on a laptop), and a common problem is that your system may see it at the wrong IRQ.  You would need the "setserial" utility to correct this.

Now you need irda-utils from < http://irda.sourceforge.net/ >
These utilities will start the IrDA service, and other applications (like JPilot) should then be able to interact with /dev/irda0 or /dev/ircomm0.

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