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. The IR hardware can be either selfmade or choosen from a variety of commercial solutions. 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!".