Remote control via infrared is not the aim of the Linux/IrDA project but is included in this HOWTO to cover "Linux and Infrared" more completely. I found three projects which worked on this topic. You may find some links to current information at MobiliX.
LInux Remote Control - LIRC
is a package that supports receiving and sending IR signals of the most common IR remote controls. It contains a device driver for hardware connected to the serial port, a daemon that decodes and sends IR signals using this device driver, a mouse daemon that translates IR signals to mouse movements and a couple of user programs that allow to control your computer with a remote control. Takahide Higuchi wrote about LIRC: "It's great, and it seems almost complete solution, but it seems there is almost nothing supporting hardware on the market (or need to solder some special circuit ... it is hard work for many people to do so). I believe that LIRC will be more popular if consumer IR support is implemented in FastIR drivers and some common API (for example, a raw IrSocket and common ioctls) is made!". You may find LIRC at http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~columbus/lirc/
To subscribe to the LIRC mailing list send an email to <lirc-request@xmission.com> with the word "subscribe" in the body of the message. There is also a mailing list archive at http://www.wh9.tu-dresden.de/~heinrich/lirc/list-archive/
Serial Infrared Remote Controller
This is a simple, cheap device that can be connected to any serial port to control most components that have infrared remote controls. It was designed and built on a solderless breadboard and is finally designed as a PC board. You may find this package at http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/remote/remote.html
Infrared Tools for the COREL Netwinder PC
Ryan Shillington wrote some tools to control the COREL Netwinder via infrared, for example:
Server Side for the Corel Palm Administrator (deamon). It depends on having ir-simple installed and up and running. With this you can check and change IP addresses, Gateway addresses, setup eth1, etc. You can also run simple commands AND you can check the Temperature, Memory, Load averages, etc.
Client Side for the Corel Palm Administrator. You can also run simple commands AND you can check the Temperature, Memory, Load averages, etc.
A very basic Infra Red device driver. This does not support IrDA (only unreliable transfers). It looks specifically for Remote Control signals (and Keyboard, etc.). It blocks and passes data up very differently.
You may find the tools at http://www.netwinder.org/~ryansh/
ir
ir is an interface program to Chris Dodge's RedRat 2 infrared controller to send and receive infrared signals to/from consumer devices like TV's, VCR's, cable boxes, and stereos. It is written in Perl. It uses only the basic Perl constructs and no external packages, so it should work on any platform that supports Perl and serial communications. It can be accessed via the command line or cron, as an email handler (through aliases), or as a cgi script which will automatically generate a form with all possible codes. It has macro capability so one command can send a series of IR signals. With an X-10's IR543, it can be used to control X10 devices, too.
irmctl
irmctl is a utility daemon to control your favorite non-IRDA infrared receiver. For the moment, only irman (through libirman) is supported.
IRManager
IRManager is a Linux daemon to make advanced use of an IRMan infrared receiver. It forwards IR signals to (multiple) native IRMan applications, and can be used with your own scripts and applications. It also has a mapping system and its advanced configuration options make it the most flexible and easy way to remote control your computer.
irXxD
irXxD irXxD is a library for sending/receiving infrared remote control codes. It includes kernel 2.0 and 2.2 modules for receiving/sending IR codes under Linux, and various support for other operating systems.