lol, replying to myself, but then I can look back later at what I did, when I forget (which I will!!).
Kernel rebuilt with lirc support and a lot of extraneous stuff removed such as laptop and hardware drivers I won't ever need. Having compiled the kernel with the necessary quirk added for the display, the 'futabaquirks.ko' module written by
Steve Williams is no longer needed and the userspace driver does indeed show the current time on the display
Glorious as this is (because I thought initially I would never get it to work under Linux), it is only the first step
This is though, where I may come majorly unstuck, as I know very little 'C'. What I
want to do is adapt the driver to work with LCDproc as XBMC includes its own version and would therefore be able to drive the display. Failing that, the aforementioned SW has written a kernel space driver, which
This driver when it has grabbed the LCD will print its device
* major number in the system log. You need to create a char device at that node
* and then any string written to that device will appear on the display
I could in that case possibly write some python to communicate with XBMC's JSON interface and write to the char device. The former would be my preferred choice and I have downloaded the source for LCDproc to see what needs doing. I can see myself taking a very intensive 'crash course' in C over the next few days.
Obviously as the machine is now back up, running and all controlled by remote as before, Sarah is back to being pleased and as I'm only going to be messing with the display driver, hopefully nothing to drastic will occur (famous last words?).
I've seen a few people with this case ask about a Linux driver for it on the XBMC forum, so if I
can manage to get something working, then hopefully it'll benefit more than just me.
Fortunately, Steve was good enough to GPL his code and if I
do manage to get something working, I will of course give him full credit as the original author.
Oh, if anyone feels that they can help out in any way, or just wants a good laugh at my lack of coding expertise, then please, feel free !!
Cheers, BE.