Fraz -- you mentally prodded me to get it working.
I had tried running irrecord, and it kept complaining that it couldn't find lircd. So I started it.
It then complained:
irrecord: could not init hardware
After poking around a little, I found a reference to loading the lirc_i2c module (see
http://pc8.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/linux/1055162507/). When I went to see if it was loaded, it wasn't. I loaded it with:
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c debug=1
/sbin/service lircd restart
and lo and behold, irrecord worked, irw worked. I *knew* the lircd.conf was OK (well, I trusted), since it's Jarod's from wilsonet.com.
Myth, however, wouldn't do anything with it, until I saw that I had not put a lircrc in ~/.mythtv. (oops).
Once that was done (again, from wilsonet), it worked perfectly.
Almost. I've added all suggested lines to /etc/modprobe.conf, but when I reboot, none of this loads automatically. lircd is non-existent. lirc_i2c -- not loaded.
Whew. Ever closer...
Thanks, and any suggestions on figuring out why these won't load would be appreciated.