IRDA on asus L3tp

[debian-laptop]

Hi all,  
 
I'm curious to know if someone out there has IRDA working on ASUS L3TP 
I can't even see the tty entry in the output dmesg  
 
dmesg | grep -i tty 
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A 
 
which is the standard serial! no irda reference found! 
 
how can i make this thing appear to work on it?  
I have read a lot of docs to make IRDA work withr linux but everything seems to 
refer to a serial emulation of irda which i can't see. 
 
thanks 
pietro lupi