We have been having trouble with the remote not being able to control the volume on our Mythbuntu installation. I just came across the pulseaudio-module-lirc package —
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-lirc
My mute button didn’t work, so I tried adding the lirc configuration as explained in this thread. It didn’t work. The volume up and down did work though before I added that configuration. The only thing I didn’t like was that it didn’t show the visual volume display on the screen.
On a side note, I found another application that looked interesting from this post: gizmod. Actually, even though the post says they don’t have deb packages, I found one already in the repositories!
Another handy program is unclutter:
sudo apt-get install unclutter
It hides the mouse cursor so that you don’t see it in front of the videos you are watching. I found it here, and here is another post about it.