Christmas came and went. Had time to fiddle. Have found that Flirc works using the same remote in an Android box running Kodi 15.2, all programmed buttons including play and pause. So its not the dongle. So its either the Ubuntu OS or the NUC. Will lirc interfere with the remote? Have had a problem with the NUC running Airplay through Kodi.The iphone would not recognise Kodi, but run it through the Android box and it worked perfectly