LIRC is indeed what you want. After you got that set up (even my exotic remote worked :) you can just use 'irexec' to hack some scripts together (I use bash) to do whatever you want. I currently run xmms, xawtv via the remote, as well as a little script that passes my last email to festival and a little snippet that will display the From and Subject header of my latest two emails on my screen, using osd_cat.