Digilent Adept 2 and FTDI drivers

This issue seems to come back to me every time I provision a virtual machine for working with Digilent boards: I install libftdi and libusb, and then download and install the Digilent Adept 2 runtime and utilities and think I’m done. But every time:

$ dadutil enum
No devices found

Frustration follows, until I remember: Digilent Adept (and Xilinx Vivado as well) requires libftd2xx. This library is closed source and therefore not available via package managers. Digilent ships a version of this library inside the runtime archive (in subfolder ftdi.drivers-<version>), or you can download the newest version from FTDI.

Unfortunately, the Adept 2 runtime installation does not install this library automatically, nor does it ask you to do so. Hence, it is easy to end up with an incomplete installation. This forum post provides a way to check if your installation is complete: use ldconfig to see what libraries are known. The output should look like this:

$ /sbin/ldconfig -p | grep ftd2xx
    libftd2xx.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib64/libftd2xx.so
    libdftd2xx.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib64/digilent/adept/libdftd2xx.so.1
    libdftd2xx.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib64/digilent/adept/libdftd2xx.so

If libftd2xx is not installed the first line will be missing; the libraries in the digilent folder are not complete implementations, as is explained in the linked forum post.

Now that I wrote it down, I hope I don’t forget again.