Take (Remote) Control
A keyboard and a mouse aren’t the only way to control your computer.
While the geek in you probably doesn’t mind having a wireless keyboard and mouse to control your multimedia powerhouse computer, it can be a bit cumbersome, especially if you have to share control. Here comes the Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) project to the rescue (http://www.lirc.org ).
The LIRC project has the simple goal of letting you use the remote of your choice to control your Linux system. LIRC supports a wide range of infrared receivers, ranging from home-made serial port versions and dongles on TV tuner cards to even Microsoft Windows XP Media Center USB receivers, along with many different remotes ranging from those bundled with some of the above-mentioned receivers to a wide range of universal and programmable remotes. Check out the LIRC web site for further details on supported hardware.
To install LIRC, you can obtain a source tarball from the site, but since it is already available as a package on several platforms check your package manager and your distribution’s third party repositories first. For instance, Axel Thimm’s ATrpms package repository at http://atrpms.net carries packaged LIRC binaries for all recent Red Hat and Fedora Core releases, installable using your favorite automatic dependency resolution program with the ATrpms repository enabled. The quick version of how to do this with a recent Fedora Core release and the Fedora-provided yum utility is to first install ...