I have the bad habit of liking to try new features in all software I use. That also includes the Linux kernel. To get daily updated kernel packages for ubuntu, I use the packages from  kernel-ppa. But I have run into the issue, that the kernel modules from the main LIRC package do not compile with these kernel packages. I searched for a solution and found it. It seems, that the autoconf.h file is not placed in the right directory by default. This means we need to make a copy in the right directory for it to work. The following is an example I used last night.

sudo cp /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc5-generic/include/generated/autoconf.h /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc5-generic/include/linux/autoconf.h

All you need to do is change "linux-headers-2.6.34-020634rc5-generic" to whatever kernel packages you downloaded from the kernel-ppa and the copied file should work for you.