I present to you, KILLA KONG – The ULTIMATE killing machine

This is something I did a while ago, but too me a long time to figure out how to get working.

Basically I was trying to control those cheap RF units used for switching lights/power on and off via my media center pc. Of course there are 400€ solutions but I am running on a budget here.

Anyways my hardware looks like this:

• Ubuntu Media Center Pc
• usb-uirt IR Blaster
• ELRO RF adapters (AB4440)
• lirc (software for sending IR signals)
• IR-RF-IR converter from conrad (not any converter working on the same 434mhz frequency should work) – in german slang they are called conrad eier

I got the codes converted from some intertechno pronto codes found on the web, but eventually the final problem turned out to be the frequency in the lircd.conf

Setting it to 20000 resolved everything, and I have to admit that I did figure it out by pure trial and error – shame on me but whatever works eh ?

So for anyone trying the same thing as I did heres my lirc conf file for controlling all this, mind you the names of the codes are related to the intertechno but I posted the translated  Elro style codes above them as a comment.

Hit the jump to check the code

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So I updated my media center to Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 and surely my the nvidia driver broke.

A terminal login screen appeared after rebooting, and after some messing around I am not entirely sure what exactly I did that caused it to work again but I am listing all steps just in case:

First remove all traces of nvidia

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sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
sudo rm -Rf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/

Next install the some stuff to make sure the nvidia driver module will compile

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sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update

Now reinstall the nvidia driver

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sudo apt-get install nvidia-cg-toolkit nvidia-current nvidia-current-modaliases nvidia-settings
sudo update-alternatives --config gl_conf

Now after entering the last step make sure nvidia-current is selected here.
Now reboot and see if everything works again, if not try to delete the xorg.conf + reboot again (sorry I had to use a workaround without syntax highlighting to circumvent the mod security policy @ apache – don't worry you don't have to understand that part )

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sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo reboot

Hello World my ass