XBMC Live Cursor showing up after power cycling TV

A massive annoyance on my XBMC live media centre (XBMC live (Eden) running on Foxconn NT-A3500). If I turn my TV off and on again, the X cursor remains on the screen. This didn't happen when i first installed XBMC live. I didn't consciously amend any settings to make this the case. The only way I could find to get around it is to either reboot the media centre or jump on the laptop and restart lightdm.

Then I got creative and wrote a quick script to run under cron (every 5 minutes) to detect when the TV is powered on and to restart lightdm.

#!/bin/bash

TVON="HDMI status: Pin=3 Presence_Detect=1 ELD_Valid=1"

for i in $(find /var/log/ -maxdepth 1 -name syslog -mmin -5)

do

{

TEST=$(grep "$TVON" "$i" | tail -n 1)

if [ "$TEST" != "" ] ; then

{

# Is this a new one?

TIMESTAMP=$(echo "$TEST" | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/\[//g' | sed 's/\]//g')

OLD_TIMESTAMP=$(cat /tmp/old_timestamp.txt)

if [ "${TIMESTAMP}" != "${OLD_TIMESTAMP}" ] ; then

{

# we need to restart lightdm

service lighdm restart

echo ${TIMESTAMP} | sed 's/\[//g' | sed 's/\]//g' > /tmp/old_timestamp.txt

}

fi

}

fi

}

done

Not elegant, but currently functional (No idea if restarting XBMC this way could be the cause of my previous post?).

Cursor no more..... :-)

XBMC Live remote not working?

Slightly off topic but my son was watching Thomas the Tank Engine on the TV yesterday (via XBMC live on a Foxconn NT-A3500). Everything was fine. I put him to bed, came down and the remote wouldn't work anymore.

I have an MCE remote I bought from maplins (model RC118) that just worked. Didn't need to perform any button translation which was good. Now its broke. Tried a few things:

• Restart xbmc (service lightdm restart)
• Restart server
• Reseat Infrared receiver

Nothing works. 

dmesg shows me that the Infrared receiver is registering:

mceusb 8-2:1.0: Registered Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver on usb8:2

XBMC just isn't able to understand the key presses. Now I know from reading the xbmc forums that lirc is partly responsible for remote controls. I try to restart lirc (service lirc restart) and it complains about missing kernel modules. w000000t. Nothing has happened on the media centre to remove kernel modules in the time I was (ahem, I mean my son was) watching Thomas the Tank Engine.

To google.....

Found the 'irw' command:

irw
000000037ff05bf2 00 Home mceusb_hauppauge

It works which proves the hardware is functioning. Now whats up with XBMC. Nothing obvious in the logs (other than the reference to lirc not starting). Google tells me to check ~userdata/Lircmap.xml. Oh, right. That doesn't exist. I'm assuming thats my problem. But this worked like an hour ago. Whats caused the file to disappear? (i still dont have a clue).

Oh well, to resolve:

cp -p /usr/share/xbmc/system/Lircmap.xml /home/bleh/.xbmc/userdata/

Edit Lircmap.xml in the new location. I deleted all sections other than the one starting:

<lircmap>

        <remote device="mceusb">

<---------Stuff--------->
        </remote
</lircmap>

Then I renamed mceusb to the name irw was showing the device as (mceusb_hauppauge). I then had to edit the /etc/lirc/hardware.conf file to remove the offending kernel module:

REMOTE_MODULES="lirc_dev "

Restarted lirc, followed by restarting XBMC and voila. A working remote.

I need to read up to understand what happened, whether removing the kernel module (lirc_mceusb2) has any nasty side effects and on lirc in general.

Hope this helps anyone with the same issue!