📡 Getting the Fintek IR receiver to work with Linux

21 Nov 2015

Some of the Medion AIO (all-in-one) desktop pc-s are equipped with IR remote receiver, which doesn’t work out of the box on linux. Instead during boot it gives the following error:

[    6.925985] fintek-cir 00:06: IR PNP Port not valid!

Quite annoying, but here is a workaround for it. It’s not really a fix, because the error message still appears at boot, but the IR receiver is going to work afterwards.

  1. Unload the module called fintek-cir:
    modprobe -r fintek-cir
  2. Fix the drivers IO mapping:
    echo "auto" > /sys/bus/acpi/devices/FIT0002:00/physical_node/resources
  3. Re-load the module fintek-cir:
    modprobe fintek-cir

  That’s it, the IR receiver should work now. You can check the tail of dmesg to make sure it’s fine.   Now to automate this process at boot, the following steps were necessary:

  1. Create a file with the following content:
    #!/bin/sh
    /sbin/modprobe -r fintek-cir
    echo "auto" > "/sys/bus/acpi/devices/FIT0002:00/physical_node/resources"
    /sbin/modprobe fintek-cir
    Save it somewhere, like /etc/fintek-cir.sh.
  2. Mark it as executable:
    chmod +x /etc/fintek-cir.sh
  3. Add an entry to the crontab (root):
    @reboot /etc/fintek-cir.sh

  The receiver should work after every (re)boot, LIRC can be installed now.