My first actual REVU contribution

Since I've been playing a lot with my new Harmony remote lately, and had to package the two programs that I found that could handle this on Linux, I figured I might as well also upload it.

From my upload to my PPA, I've been lucky enough to have a lot of functionality pointers from my friend John... Anyway, thanks for that.

Since neither Debian nor Ubuntu contained the packages, I've also uploaded them to REVU, to get reviews from MOTUs, and hopefully have my packages included to the universe repository.

In the meantime, if someone who has reviewer access be nice enough to review concordance and congruity, I'd be very thankful for any and all input to improve my packaging skills :)

And of course, thanks to the developers of concordance and congruity for making something easy to work with.

My next tasks: getting my workplace to adopt Ubuntu as an operating system for some workstations, and fixing some of the issues I'm still running into with KDE4.1.

Finally, thanks to Tom Dyer for his post about KDE4.1 (found it on ubuntuweblogs.org; was very useful to start fixing the horrendous issues that previous version had, at least on my system.

Update: Congruity & Concordance, packages on PPA

As promised in previous post, the packages for congruity and concordance (the libraries congruity depends on, and a command-line interface) are now available on my PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~mathieu-tl/+archive

If you're using the current Ubuntu version, Hardy, the easiest way to get those is to add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu hardy main

Or, for the previous Ubuntu version (gutsy):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu gutsy main

Then sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install congruity. This will install all of the required packages to run the graphical version of the Logitech Harmony remote configuration tool, congruity, version 8.

Using the Logitech Harmony 670 remote on Linux

Yesterday I bought the ONE remote to RULE them all. Seriously. The best 100$ investment ever (was on sale).

Anyway, so I brought home my acquisition, proceeded to program it to handle all my electronic equipment in the living room. The only issue was to setup my computer to be able to program the remote. This is how I did it:

1. Make sure you've got libusb (on Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install libusb-0.1-4) installed. Might also need libusb-dev.


2. Downloaded two packages:
   
   
   • congruity-8.tar.bz2
   • concordance-0.20.tar.bz2
   
   


3. Setup concordance first, for the libconcord library as well as the python bindings for using congruity:
   
   
   
   
   1. Under the concordance tarball directory, in libconcord/: ./configure --prefix=/usr
   
   
   2. Then, make and sudo make install to build the library and install it to /usr/lib
   
   
   3. Cd to bindings/python, run python setup.py build and sudo python setup.py install
   
   
   
   


4. Now, you can go in the extracted tarball directory of congruity, and run sudo ./congruity. You'll notice that it fails, expecting to be passed a filename on every run. You'll need to go on the members.harmonyremote.com website, create an account (if you don't have one already), then proceed through the various steps. When the site expects you to download an EZHex file, save it and manually start congruity (with sudo or as root, as always), or setup your browser to open the files using something like a little wrapper script that would call, for example, gksudo congruity.
5. Optionally move the congruity-8 directory (the extracted tarball stuff) to someplace where it can live indefinitely, perhaps somewhere in the path?
   

The rest of the usage should be pretty straightforward. Once the remote is programmed for your devices, point and click :D

I'll probably be building Ubuntu packages for concordance and congruity, so when those are done I'll write a new post with the links. In the meantime, check my PPA page occasionally at https://launchpad.net/~mathieu-tl/+archive, or in sources.list: http://ppa.launchpad.net/mathieu-tl/ubuntu.