For a software interface to this device, you'll need to use lirc, the Linux Infrared Remote Control daemon. Basically this daemon polls the IR receiver and makes the signals available to applications via an API that uses TCP network sockets. This allows applications to register the types of signals that they would like to receive. One special thing about getting lirc running is that you likely won't be able to use you packaging system to install a proper lirc daemon. The reason for this is that lirc needs to be compiled against your running kernel's source code because it builds a kernel module. Some distros may have a binary package available but most times it has been built for the particular IR receiver that the package maintainer used.

I always suggest to people that you never go for the "compiling from source" option first. Always try to download the binary package through your distros normal package manager (up2date for Redhat, apt-get for Debian, etc..) first. In this case, we need to build this package from source to get the correct IR device driver kernel module built against our running kernel, so we will go over the generic "build from source" instructions made possible by automake and autoconf.