Luckily I still have RH 7.3 on this Latitude laptop (dual booting with RH 8.0). I turned on my irda device and booted it up. I have two serial ports showing in my "dmesg" command:
The "ttyS01" is actually my ir port. Also if I type "# /usr/sbin/findchip -v" I get:
There is also an "irda" service but I am unsure as to what this is for (# /sbin/chkconfig --list irda). It doesn't want to seem to start on my system under RedHat 7.3 (well it says it starts but it really doesn't).
On the other hand when I boot into RedHat 7.3 that irda service *does* start and a "findchip -v" reports this:
Notice it says "Enabled" in RH8 after starting the irda service.
I will have to do more reading to understand what it's for. I think I could actually use my ir port if I had a phone with an ir port in RH 8.0, not sure about 7.3. Along with browsing over that HOWTO I linked you might want to look at /usr/share/doc/irda-utils-0.9.14/README which should be on your system.
I don't know if any of this helps but it might at least tell you if it can see your IR port. Without that you probably won't be able to go any further. Use that "findchip -v" command and see if it sees your IR chip.
[edit]
I think I just figured out what the irda service does. It configures your machine with an "irda" network interface. I just configured my "irda0" network interface with an IP address. If I had another Laptop with an IR port I guess I could have a TCP/IP connection between the laptops through the IR ports.
Wait, I have another old Latitude, I hope it has an IR port. If it does I'll give it a shot. BTW, for your cell phone thing you probably do *not* want the irda service started because you want to use it as a serial port. Again, this is my first time messing with IR so take what I say with a grain of salt.
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[edit2]
Damn, I have RedHat 6.2 installed on my old old Latitude which doesn't seem to support the irda on that box. I wanted to install RedHat 8.0 but I ran into some snags. That machine doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. Only a floppy drive, a 500MB hard drive, my LinkSys PCMCIA ethernet card, and 72MB of RAM.
Without a CD-ROM I had to do a Network install of 6.2 way back when 6.2 just came out by booting from the pcmcia boot disk and installing off my web server. Well, I tried to boot the RedHat 8.0 pcmcia boot disk hoping to do a minimal network install to test out the irda under RedHat 8.0 and it doesn't like my pcmcia so no network.
That leaves me with just a floppy to install with. If I had a bigger hard drive I could download the CD images to the hard drive and install from there, but a 500MB drive ain't gonna cut it. Oh well, so much for testing my irda network. I think it would have been fun.
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[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
