We've not done a lot of playing ourselves, but generally: get the IR utils
package and at the very least compile up irattach: you will need
a kernel with IrDA support (the PPP 2.2.12 kernel
here
will do nicely). The IrDA is /dev/ttyS2, so you need to do:
irattach /dev/ttyS2
You can then enable IrDA discovery by doing:
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/irda/discovery
...and at this point if I wave my Palm V in front of the empeg the Palm
decides something is trying to talk to it and if you cat
/proc/net/irda/discovery (no sys!) then it tells me the
name of my Palm.
I've not gone further than this yet as it proved the IrDA was doing stuff. The irtutils archive has various IrOBEX stuff for talking to Palms.