Enabling infrared port on Dell laptop running Ubuntu

I was looking to get my Dell IR port enabled so that I could synchronize my Palm with the content on the laptop using it and ran into some interesting issues. For one, the serial connection between the Palm and the laptop works flawlessly so that is always an option. But I am not all that interested in plugging yet another cord into the laptop to achieve something so I thought that I would embark on getting the infrared port enabled so that I could sync that way.

Well, it looked like I needed to install an update to the irda-utils and setserial packages. Off to Synaptic I went and, when I selected the packages to update, it prompted me for my install CD. This was much to reminiscent of Windows updates for my taste, but I did manage to burn a new CD from and .iso that I had lying around and popped it in the drive.

Well, it turns out that the setserial package could not be located on the CD because of a hash sum mismatch. It turns out that there is an option in Synaptic that allows you to configure it not to use CDs (check out this thread for details). Configuring this option allowed the updates to be installed without a hitch.

So, did all of this enable the IR port? Nope. Unfortunately, I need to do a bit more work to get that going.


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