FreeFoote's Arbitrary Internet Home

LCD Menu

What is it?

I bought this very fancy LCD panel from CwLinux and put it in my FileServer, as pictured on the right. Adding my cutdown keypad resulted in a system whereby I could do things with the fileserver, without having a monitor and keyboard attached.

Naturally, the FileServer is configurable from the network, but hey, why not have a little fun with it? After I set up all the hardware, it was time for the software.

So I wrote some software that uses LCDproc to make a menu system that allows you to control things on the server. Naturally, when the menu is not being shown, it just goes through a number of screens of statistics.

So yes, that's right, I wrote software to do this... other than LCDproc, which I didn't write. But the rest of the menu system I wrote using shell scripts and C. I used a minimum of C, to make the menus as powerful as possible. The actual menu contents and actions are shell scripts, so you can modify them very easily.

What do I need?

To get started, you'll need a number of things:

• A computer running Linux. Any distro will work.
• A LCD display - to actually display things. See LCDproc's hardware page for information about how to obtain something suitable.
• LCDproc - which you can download from http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net. I would recommend the stable version - I used 0.4.x. You can try 0.5.x, but at the time of writing, this caused me problems.
• A keyboard to hook up to the system. You can use a full keyboard, or go out and buy one of those small ones, or make your own cutdown keyboard.
• A headless computer to run this on. If you have a monitor attached, where's all the fun?

Download and Installation

You can download the package: LCD Menu 0.9 (60k)

Just extract the file somewhere, and then read the README and INSTALL files to get you started. Most of it should just "work", but see how you go.

A word of warning: the default menus will probably not suit your system. Also, I consider this quite "uncompleted". Many things that I had intended to do with the menu system are undone - but this is of no consequence. The core is completed and stable, so don't be afraid to download it!

But other than that, have fun! Any comments, suggestions, bugfixes, new features - just contact me.