The bug is: The remote control will not start my application if irexec is started by init when booting. The irexec was added to boot level default. I see the message "Starting irexec /home/wmichaels1/.lircrc ..." during boot. However: The remote control starts my application if irexec is started from a terminal using: sudo /etc/init.d/irexec start The irexec program in the lirc package can be run as a system daemon by init using the files placed in /etc/iniit.d/irexec and /etc/conf.d/irexec when lirc is installed with portage. It recommends that the init script specify a real user other than the default "root". I edited /etc/conf.d/irexec to use wmichaels1, my normal user. My fix: Add "--env HOME=/home/${IREXEC-USER}" to the start-stop-daemon arguments. Here is what the start-stop-daemon command looks like for my fix: start-stop-daemon --start --chuid ${IREXEC_USER} --user ${IREXEC_USER} \ --env HOME="/home/${IREXEC_USER}/" \ --exec /usr/bin/irexec -- --daemon ${IREXEC_OPTS} Note: The argument "--chdir /" was removed because it is not documented as a valid argument on the start-stop-daemon man page. Results: With the above start-stop-daemon arguments my remote control now starts my application when the /etc/init.d/irexec script is run during system boot.
With current baselayout, start-stop-daemon is supposed to update $HOME whenever --user is specified, to match that user's home. Since $HOME for ${IREXEC_USER} in /etc/passwd is presumably the same as /home/${IREXEC_USER} , the proposed patch should not be necessary. However, it could be possible that the actual fix for your issue was the removal of the "--chdir /" option (which is valid according to the start-stop-daemon manpage currently) Please confirm if there are any issues with irexec and newer lirc's.
I confirm that the current version of /etc/init.d/irexec works properly for me. Thanks for taking the time to look into this. My working solution involves settings in /etc/conf.d/irexec: IREXEC_OPTS="/home/mythtv/.lircrc" IREXEC_USER="mythtv" Everything works as expected without modifying /etc/init.d/irexec
