Displaylink has NO LINUX Support

[Lope]

It would be nice if Displaylink made a driver for a current release of Ubuntu Linux.

I've been unable to use Displaylink products on Linux.
Its immensely frustrating.

[Beaker]

can we make this a sticky thread, so people researching can know they should not buy any displaylink products?

[display-damiano]

It says Linux supported but the only reasonable result is a green monitor.
I am using Kubuntu 12.04 and X11 integration is non existent

I did try various "guides" nut the results are near zero.

Lots of money are spent to support all the various versions of Windows but nothing is spent on the cheaper and better Linux alternative.

I cannot use WIndows on NSA spying, so the only alternative is Linux !!

[Lope]

There are so many people frustrated with Displaylink, its crazy.

Here is a site all about Displaylink's driver support
http://displaylinklinuxdriver.wordpress.com

Its important that we come back to this forum regularly and post and post our disagreement with Displaylink's policies and get the word out (on other forums and blogs) that Displaylink is not Linux friendly as they claim to be.

[Beaker]

nice link!

[xork]

Very sad.. checking in on this issue after I received a dock through work 5 months ago. All this because according to DisplayLink, they need to ensure content protection remains secure under an open source environment. To hell with the greed and DRM! If someone were to crowdsource a solution, I would throw my money at it.

[brycenesbitt]

To be clear: The Linux Kernel supports the DisplayLink 1x0 and 1x5 series chips, which are to date the most commonly used. These are limited to 16 bit color, but do function well.

DisplayLink has declined to release information on the 3x0 series of chips (the USB3 with Ethernet models).

However, even with basic support built into Linux, getting a multi monitor display is still challenging, as multiple questions on "ask ubuntu" attest:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/6382/how-can-i-get-a-displaylink-usb-monitor-under-ubuntu-any-recent-version/

A little bit of challenge grant money from DisplayLink could turn that around, and make DisplayLink plug and play on most Linux distributions.

[jkhanlar]

It says Linux supported but the only reasonable result is a green monitor.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/fb/udlfb.txt
If the DisplayLink device is successful, it will paint a "green screen" which means that from a hardware and fbdev software perspective, everything is good.

See http://plugable.com/2011/12/23/usb-graphics-and-linux/ for some config deets to get xorg to work. I haven't tried Wayland yet.

[Dan]

To be clear: The Linux Kernel supports the DisplayLink 1x0 and 1x5 series chips, which are to date the most commonly used. These are limited to 16 bit color, but do function well.

DisplayLink has declined to release information on the 3x0 series of chips (the USB3 with Ethernet models).

However, even with basic support built into Linux, getting a multi monitor display is still challenging, as multiple questions on "ask ubuntu" attest:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/6382/how-can-i-get-a-displaylink-usb-monitor-under-ubuntu-any-recent-version/

A little bit of challenge grant money from DisplayLink could turn that around, and make DisplayLink plug and play on most Linux distributions.

We also implement open standards audio and ethernet on our chips, and iPXE now even talks to us to boot from.. I will readily admit that this isn't a whole lot of use if you can't get any pixels to the screen. I also don't think it's a great secret how to get 24bit colour on DL1x0/1x5.

How about this: if mainline linux makes it trivial to use DL1x5 we'll make it trivial to use DL3xx0? (not that I can make the promise myself.. but it would certainly help if that was so).

And yes, of course, if the open source community ponied up the same level of money we get through chip sales to OEMs to support Linux we could do it, although it may be in a less than ideal binary form.

[ctoth]

I understand that the Linux situation is complex, since it also depends a lot on the graphics driver. I have nVidia SLI config, and I see that the solution is very close, but it's not there. Even when I use the proprietary nVidia driver I see that during character mode while the kernel boots my DisplayLink USB monitor becomes alive (doesn't display anything though). I gues sthat happens when the fb driver is loaded.
Unity is another thing. Interestingly, if I switch to nouveau driver, Unity only dsiplays on my DisplayLink monitor, and the laptop's monitor remains blank. o_O
Is there any solution for that? The USB monitor works in that case, but I want extnded desktop and utilize the laptop's monitor too obviously...