Setting up the VRC-1000 remote on XBMC Frodo with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Setting up a remote has been the most frustrating experience I hve had since I moved to Linux.

I recently updated my main OS to Linux Mint 17 XFCE (based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) and just gave up on setting up my good old XBOX remote : the new OS just did not recognize it anymore. I purchased a VRC-1000 and expected an easy setup. I used this step by step page on the XBMC Wiki, but somehow XBMC was still ignoring my remote. After some fiddling around, I found the issue in the above tutorial. In the Lircmap.xml file, the device names <remote device="irremote0"> and <remote device="irremote1"> should be written with full path : <remote device="/dev/input/irremote0"> and <remote device="/dev/input/irremote1">.

Now off to (finally!) watching a movie…