First we will talk to the IRMan with a program called minicom. It is a terminal program for serial ports. It's most commonly used with serial modems. To setup minicom we start it with the the command.

minicom -s

We then go to "Serial port setup" and we set the port to be /dev/ttyS0 (the first serial tty). We then set the speed to 9600 baud, 8 data bits, No parity, and 1 stop bit. Here is a "beat you over the head with the details explanation of RS-232 Serial Communication.. look for "Baud Rate Explained" and "Signal Bits" to explain what the above things are. After we setup our serial port, we "Save setup as dfl" (that's short for default) and then we "Exit from minicom" and restart it with our new settings.

minicom

When we first start it up (on my machine at least) we see some trash that seems to be a reminent of the device powering up. By the specs of the device we should send the ASCII characters "I" then "R" to the device and we should get a response of the characters "O" then "K". This provides us with a way to test in our code whether the device is attached and working properly. After this, the device should start sending us the Infrared signal codes that it receives. So we press some buttons on our generic remote control and we should see minicom spit some characters out for us.