A.K.A.: I bought a Logitech Harmony 525 remote control and a €1.49 remote saved my day!

When I say “525” in this post, I of course mean the Logitech Harmony 525.

My boss gave me a Mediamarkt gift coupon and this week I decided to buy something for it. I chose a universal remote control, because my current tv (also from my boss :)) had no remote control. I believe his daughter bit it to pieces :p

Logitech seemed a wise choice. I think it’s a trustworthy brand, and I really like their squeezebox line.

I plugged it in and of course linux doesn’t have any descent support for it :(

But Virtualbox to the rescue. I had already have it installed, so I fired it up, but the logitech remote didn’t show up in Windows. Hmzz, after reading the virtualbox FAQ I added this line to my /etc/fstab:

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none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

Restarted my box, fired up Virtualbox and voila: I could now access the remote from Windows XP. After installing the driver and signing up for an account I was of. Added my xbox, dvd player an tv to the remote and it worked! Not like a charm, because not all of the features of the original remote of my tv (a Sanyo CE28FWH2F-C) were added to the 525. A search on google didn’t return anything useful so the only solution was to copy the infrared codes from the original remote. But I didn’t have it so I took my chances with a cheap 1,49 remote from Action. And because of the nice Harmony remote software it was easy as pie.