On 24-Apr-07, at 2:37 PM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> Many of these applications are looking for standard keyboard or mouse
> events, since the controllers are comparatively uncommon.  What's
> needed, then, is a way to map the IR inputs to a normal event for a
> particular application.  That, in turn, may have some issues with
> window manager focus in some situations, but we may choose to define
> that away.

That's the approach linux is taking on at least some of the devices.   
For example, the Nexus driver for linux turns the IR port into an  
'input device' that generates keycodes according to some map file  
that is ioctl'd into the kernel...

I have 2 largely identical linux mythfrontends.  One using the old  
LIRC serial driver for an IR input, and another using the Nexus-S IR  
driver but in every other respect, identical.  The latter is far more  
responsive from a usability perspective... scrolling through channels  
or movie listings is much faster on the latter.