How to configure an Antec Fusion Black display on Linux

I recently bought a HTPC in an Antec Fusion Black case that has a lovely blue vacuum fluorescence display (VFD) at the front. Of course it only comes with Windows drivers and I didn't even think of possibly using it in Linux until I got the box and saw how nice it was. So I spent a couple of hours on Google and did find a way to not only get the VFD to display something, but found out that MythTV even supports displaying interesting information like channel IDs, programme titles etc. on it.

This is not for the faint hearted, it involves patching and compiling kernel modules. I'm not going to duplicate all the instructions here, but give you some pointers and hints that helped me get it up and running where the documentation involved some guesswork.

First of all, the system I'm using is a MythBuntu box - MythBuntu is a Ubuntu derivative that comes with a nicely preconfigured MythTV. So these tips will show you how to make the display work on Ubuntu based distributions, but the steps for other distributions will be quite similar. In order to be able to compile the kernel module, we will need a few additional packages installed. Here's a list of packages I installed:

• linux-kernel-devel
• linux-headers-2.6
• autoconf
• automake

The first one should install quite a number of dependencies like gcc and various other development tools that are needed to get everything compiled and installed.

Next, I downloaded two source packages (I created a directory for this that I'll call /root/install for now. Oh, I also like to work as root when installing stuff, just run "sudo su -" to get a root shell). The source packages can be downloaded with apt-get like this:

• apt-get source lirc
• apt-get source lcdproc

Both packages need to be patched with patches that can be found here together with instructions that I'm not going to repeat here. A few hints about the installation of lirc, though. When the standard Ubuntu lirc package is installed, it puts the lirc_imon module in /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/ubuntu/media/lirc/lirc_imon, but when you compile it from the lirc sources and run make install, the new patched version will be put in /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/misc. Remove the module from the original directory, run "rmmod lirc_imon", then run "depmod" to update the module dependency table and then run "modprobe lirc_imon" to load the new, patched module. The installation instructions for the lcdproc configuration have a small mistake - do not put the "Size=" parameter in the LCDd.conf file or the program will not work. You may want to set the contrast parameter to make the display readable by setting "Contrast=100".

At this point, after you've patched, compiled and installed the lirc module and the lcdproc tool and started the LCDd daemon, you're ready to enable the LCD settings in the MythTV frontend "General" setup. It works like a charm, except that the driver currently doesn't support any non-english ASCII characters and will display a space in their place. I'm sure someone will eventually extend the patch to include a fix for this as well.