I often listen to music or podcast on my PC when dropping off to sleep. The trouble is sometimes the volume will jump up when a new channel/podcasts is loaded from my playlist. I have been looking for an infra red remote control and USB IR receiver unit to control my software without having to jump out of bed!
I have seen devices that are very cheap to buy but only ever advertise Windows compatibility and Windows Media Center abilities. Does anyone know of a suitable Linux unit and possibly what accompanying software to control my system ? Obviously the supplied drivers are for Windows only - I don't really want to buy one, albeit cheaply, and have it not usable.
I have looked at the LIRC project but I'm not sure about tying this in to control my PC applications (mostly Amarok and XMMS which has the IRman plugin BTW). Any suggestions more than welcome.

I have a digital tv card that comes with a remote.
http://www.nebula-electronics.com/in....asp?Code=0701
You can get the remote separately and it does work with linux.

There is a lirc config for it here :
http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/...tronics/DigiTV

They don't sell the IR receiver separately though so you could try one of these :
http://www.irblaster.info/receiver.html
They do a USB version too.

Irman is a self build IR receiver.

Lirc has to be compiled so you're on your own basically with that ---
http://www.lirc.org/html/index.html

I used Mythdora to run my tv cards and the remote works fine.

Thanks for the information - that looks interesting. I will probably go with something like this which is dirt cheap and look at lirc to possibly control my audio software and maybe more. I have found quite a few youtube videos such as this of people using lirc to control their machines so I am quite optimistic.

That remote you linked is unknown as far as using lirc is concerned. It could be a waste of money.

Ah, so lirc only works for certain controllers? My apologies, I will really have to read up on lirc - I was under the impression it "just worked" for everything and was programmable for different controllers. Possibly not a wise assumption.