Actually I have an ATI remote that's fully supported by Debian that I thought about using. I'd rather just have the gamepad, but the remote idea is my fallback. Remotes have a tendancy to go missing in my house though. Apparently the shorter portion of the local population thinks they look an awful lot like toys.
LOL. at some point in the future we're going to be the shorter portion of the local population. Anyway, then you're going to have to locate a suitable driver with perl bindings (or use expect etc) if a suitable generic device driver for the interface won't do.
the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H