I bought the Remote Control X10 from Pollin, because it is radio-controlled (not infrared), really cheap and seems to work for lots of people with LIRC on an Ubuntu machine. There are really a lot of tutorials out there, but must of them for older versions of ubuntu/lirc and for another version of the rc. Mine has a “Medion” label and a scroll wheel.
Because all configuration files by others didn’t work for my setup, here is what I did to make it work. This tutorial assumes, you are using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and lirc 0.8.7.
boundary functions 