I had a look at the VS1838B and it is very similar to IR receivers which I have used very successfully in the past.
If you really want to attach it to a Galileo then I think you could build a small interface for it using a PIC12F629.
Connect the output signal from the IR Receiver to the PIC's INT pin and use an interrupt to count the widths of the LOW and HIGH pulses.
Then decode the pulse widths depending on the protocol your IR Transmitter uses, and use a software UART to transmit the results to Galileo on Galileo's RX pin.
In Arduino (or Linux) read from the chip using standard serial / UART methods.