It's an infrared remote control. In my case it's an RC811. If you also happen to have abadoned Windows from your machine, you might regard this solely as a place holder to prevent dust from entering the chassis of your computer, as it is a bit tricky to get it to function with lirc.
Today I finally stumbled upon the solution how to get it to work under Ubuntu, which consists of 3 steps. 2 are specific to the RC811 remote control, but one should be interesting to a wider circle of people.
0. Upon package installation "ITE8709 CIR port" is the appropriate type of remote control (at least for my laptop).
1. A remote control definition file is needed. In my case the correct one could be found here
2. The lirc version included in the repositories (v.0.8.7 at the time of this writing) has a bug. Referencing it in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf does not work. For example this means, that the following line would not have the desired effect:
REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF="/usr/share/lirc/remotes/generic/RC811"
Therefore the content of the definition file needs to be pasted in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf.
You can assume that this bug is present, if you have the following symptoms:
0. mode2 does work, but irw does not.
1. if the lirc daemon is started with the -n option, the following error message is displayed:
"config file contains no valid remote control definition"
If you want to control your mouse using the remote control, this /etc/lircrc might be helpful.
