A few years ago I finally had the time to actually configure my Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 sound card with LIRC so that both the volume control knob and the remote controller function under Linux. Recently 0x0000ff has reached out notifying me that the guide does not completely work for people using the Wayland display server in place of X.Org, as sending keyboard signals works a bit differently there. Fortunately they were also kind enough to provide the list of changes needed as well as the relevant configuration files. With their permission this post will serve as an addendum to the previous guide, but only documenting the differences needed to make it compatible with Wayland.
Setup
They’ve made the Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 sound card work with the setup below:
- KDE Neon (Ubuntu LTS based Linux distribution)
- systemd: 249.11-0ubuntu3.7
- KDE Plasma: 5.27.2
- KDE Frameworks: 5.103.0
- Wayland: 1.21.0
- ydotool: latest version from master GitHub branch
I’ve tested it on my Gentoo laptop with the following setup:
- Linux kernel: 6.3.1
- systemd: 253.4
- udev: 217-r5
- KDE Plasma: 5.27.4
- KDE Frameworks: 5.105.0
- ydotool: 1.0.4
- xorg-server: 21.1.8
Installing packages
Instead of xdotool we will be using different program, ydotool, which works
with Wayland, X.Org, and more.
You can simply install it by:
# emerge ydotool
On some distributions (e.g. Debian based systems) the ydotool package is rather
old and has issues, so it might be worth installing it manually from
source.
Configuration
UDEV
If the /dev/uinput has incorrect permissions, a new udev rule is needed to
make sure it has RW permissions for all users. For that let’s create
/etc/udev/rules.d/10-uinput.rules with the following content:
KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0666"
Then make the rule is live:
# udevadm control --reload-rules
Finally let’s trigger it manually, as it will not trigger automatically until
the next boot, since the kernel has already loaded the uinput module:
# udevadm trigger --name-match=uinput
After that the device should have correct permissions:
$ ll /dev/uinput
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 10, 223 May 19 21:35 /dev/uinput
Starting the service
First enable the ydotoold service for your user and then start it:
$ systemctl --user enable ydotool
$ systemctl --user start ydotool
An OpenRC unit is also available if not using systemd.
User action configuration
In the ~/.config/lircrc file instead of xdotool use ydotool, e.g.:
begin
remote = RM-850
prog = irexec
config = /usr/bin/ydotool key 114:1 114:0
button = KEY_VOLUMEDOWN
repeat = 1
end
begin
remote = RM-850
prog = irexec
config = /usr/bin/ydotool key 115:1 115:0
button = KEY_VOLUMEUP
repeat = 1
end
begin
remote = RM-850
prog = irexec
config = /usr/bin/ydotool key 113:1 113:0
button = KEY_MUTE
end
Note that ydotool has a different syntax, as it’s using actual key codes!
At this point everything should be working.
ydotool does not connect
If for whatever reason ydotool fails to connect to ydotoold them the
YDOTOOL_SOCKET environment variable has to be set explicitly to point to the
socket’s location. Normally this should not be needed unless if you are launching
ydotoold in a non-standard way, e.g. via KDE Plasma’s autostart, and you have
set a custom socket location.
Use ~/.profile or KDE session environment
variables in this case
to make the environment variable available for the entire session:
export YDOTOOL_SOCKET="<your/custom/socket/path>"