Using X-Rite i1 Display Pro with Ubuntu Trusty 14.04

As mentioned in a previous post, I borrowed an X-Rite i1 Display Pro color calibration device from my job recently and have been calibrating every display I can get my hands on :P

This proved to be a bit of an issue on my various Ubuntu-powered machines, though, as the packages for dispcalGUI that are in the Trusty repos don't support the device yet! I discovered this when the program repeatedly failed with:

new_disprd() failed with 'Instrument Access Failed'

When trying to figure out what was going wrong, I opened up a terminal and ran the 'dispcal' program directly (that is, without the GUI) with the -D5 debugging switch, which gave a little more information:

init_inst returned 'Hardware Failure' (External EEPRrom checksum doesn't match)
new_disprd failed because init_inst failed
dispcal: Error - new_disprd() failed with 'Instrument Access Failed'

Evidently, the EEPRrom checksums can't be trusted and the newer version knows to ignore them, so go download the new version from the dispcalGUI website (I recommend scrolling down to the 'conventional installation' section, which has debs instead of fooling around with the default 'zero installation' business they point you toward).

With the new package, you should be able to use your device without any problems.