Introduction

About this Document
This document was meant as a tutorial for LCDproc users. It tries to introduce you into the world of LCDproc giving you an overview of the project. After reading this document you will be able to set up your own LCDproc'ed system.
Please note that this document is still "under construction". We hope to finish it until the final release of LCDproc, which will probably take place in May or June 2002. If you run into any trouble feel free to write to the LCDproc mailing list. See http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/mail.php3 for details on how to subscribe to the list.
This document was written for LCDproc 0.4.3. At the time of writing there had already been the "LCDproc User's Guide" written by William W. Ferrel in 1998. William's stuff is copyright © 1998, William W. Ferrel. His version covered an early version of LCDproc and therefore concentrated on Matrix Orbital displays.
William's document was "recycled" for the description of the Matrix Orbital display driver and for other parts of this document.

What is LCDproc?
LCDproc is a client/server suite including drivers for all kinds of nifty LCD displays.
The server 'LCDd' makes it possible to display text and other data on an LCD display. As well LCDd can handle certain input devices.
Support for devices is added by drivers. We distinguish between output and input drivers. LCDd currently supports only one single output driver, which may at the same time handle input. Nevertheless several input (only) drivers are supported.
Currently there are drivers for several serial devices: Matrix Orbital, Crystal Fontz, Bayrad, LB216, LCDM001 (kernelconcepts.de), Wirz-SLI and PIC-an-LCD; and some devices connected to the LPT port: HD44780, STV5730, T6963, SED1520 and SED1330. There are input (only) drivers for LIRC and joysticks.
Clients can connect to LCDd through common sockets.
Various clients are available. The "main" client lcdproc, which is shipped with the LCDproc distribution, can display things like CPU load, system load, memory usage, uptime, and a lot more.

The LCDproc Server - LCDd
LCDd is one of those well known *NIX daemons. BUT it's not just *one* daemon. It's the one that is supposed to drive your LCD ;)
LCDd can either be run from the command line or automatically by the init scripts shipped with the distribution.
As other daemons, LCDd has to be configured. In this respect a lot has changed since LCDproc 0.4.1. While LCDd retrieved all its configuration settings from the command line in 0.4.1, it now has a configuration file, which is normally /etc/LCDd.conf.

The LCDproc "Main" Client - lcdproc
While LCDd only offer the functionality of displaying text on a display, lcdproc actually retrieves data worth displaying.
lcdproc gets its information from the /proc filesystem.
lcdproc can connect to an LCDproc server either on the local system or on a remote system as long as it is reachable. It extracts the same statistics regardless of where it sends this information. The statistics it gathers include CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk utilization, network utilization, system uptime, time, and date, and so on. It displays this information in assorted ways, and can be tailored to taste.

Other LCDproc Clients
As it is rather simple to write an LCDproc client, you can find various clients on the Internet.
Unfortunately we cannot provide a list of LCDproc clients (yet). So, have fun searching google or freshmeat. Simply type 'lcdproc' for the keyword.