Support for VFD mdm166a

[Burkart Lingner]

Neither package lcdproc nor lcdproc-extra-drivers provides support for the VFD mdm166a even though there is support for it in the source code and `man LCDd` lists it as one of the supported drivers.

However, it's probably hard to support this display as its driver code requires libhid which is not available for Ubuntu anymore, starting with 10.10. Therefore it would most likely require a rewritten driver using e.g. libusb instead.

Nevertheless I think it would be a good idea to let the user know of displays Ubuntu doesn't support, at the very least by not listing them in the man page as supported. Looking at some of the other bugs reported for this package, it seems like this problem doesn't affect the mdm166a driver alone.

Almost forgot, this is for Ubuntu 11.10 and lcdproc + lcdproc-extra-drivers version 0.5.4-6.

[Burkart Lingner (burkart)]

If someone else encounters this problem, here's how you can manually compile mdm166a support:

sudo apt-get install lcdproc
sudo apt-get build-dep lcdproc
cd /tmp
wget http://altruistic.lbl.gov/mirrors/ubuntu/pool/universe/libh/libhid/libhid0_0.2.15+20060325-2.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
wget http://altruistic.lbl.gov/mirrors/ubuntu/pool/universe/libh/libhid/libhid-dev_0.2.15+20060325-2.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i libhid0_0.2.15+20060325-2.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install libusb-dev
sudo dpkg -i libhid-dev_0.2.15+20060325-2.2ubuntu1_i386.deb
wget http://lcdproc.sourceforge.net/nightly/lcdproc-CVS-current.tar.gz
tar -xzvf lcdproc-CVS-current.tar.gz
cd lcdproc-0.5dev
./configure --enable-drivers=mdm166a
make server
cd server/drivers
sed -i 's|report(\(.*\)%s\(.*\)hid_strerror(ret)|report(\1%d\2ret|' mdm166a.c
sed -i 's|\(\$(mdm166a_LDFLAGS).*\)$|\1 -lhid|' Makefile
make mdm166a.so
sudo cp mdm166a.so /usr/lib/lcdproc/

At this point you should be able to use lcdproc with mdm166a-type VFDs. Try this to stop LCDd and run it in the foreground:

sudo /etc/init.d/LCDd stop
sudo LCDd -f -d mdm166a

If you omit the sudo in front of the last command, you'll probably get an error code 12 which stands for HID_RET_FAIL_DETACH_DRIVER, i.e. the driver could not detach the standard kernel driver.