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View Full Version : X Server Crash/Loop? Mint 18 Cinnamon (4.4.0-21-generic) with DisplayLink 1.1.68


rdkls
08-16-2016, 05:46 PM
TLDR; With the USB adapter connected and displaylink.service running the system crashes, does not crash if displaylink.service is not running.

Excessive blabbing below;

New to linux, hence Mint. I have worked through quite a few things to get my laptop where I want it for productivity, but am stuck on getting my monitors wrapped up.

Windows life...
http://i.imgur.com/PBhlSNml.jpg

It's an Aorus X7v2 with dual GTX 860M which supports the bottom three screens + laptop display natively... and surprisingly out of the box with Mint 18 (Cinnamon). Onboard mini-DP, HDMI and VGA; everything working there.

Other information: UEFI, secure-boot enabled, dual-boot W10 and Mint. The computer has three 120GB mSata and a 1TB HDD; Mint installed on sdc, W10 installed on sdb, sda is just storage and sdd is the third mSata I'm using to store VM images.

lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 931.5G 0 part /mnt/DATA
sdb 8:16 0 119.2G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 450M 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 0 99M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sdb3 8:19 0 16M 0 part
└─sdb4 8:20 0 118.7G 0 part
sdc 8:32 0 119.2G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 104G 0 part /
└─sdc2 8:34 0 15.3G 0 part [SWAP]
sdd 8:48 0 119.2G 0 disk /mnt/VM


I connected my IOGear USB 3.0 to HDMI (https://www.iogear.com/product/GUC3025HW6) adapter and it seems to have been detected properly;

lsusb | grep Display
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 17e9:4301 DisplayLink

The display was not showing up in the Display System settings, doing a detect and a reboot did not help.

I downloaded the 1.1.68 driver and installed it via (Unfortunately, I did not copy the output when this ran.);
chmod +x displaylink-driver-1.1.62.run
sudo ./displaylink-driver.1.1.62.run

Approx. 30-45 seconds after that finished my other three screens (nvidia) went blank and the laptop display was showing what I can only describe as a loop of some sort; blinking cursor > black screen > blinking cursor > black screen... repeat.

Could not get to CTRL-ALT-F1 (even though I wouldn't know what to do there), had to CTRL-ALT-DEL x2 to reboot and ended up with the same thing.

Disconnected the USB adapter and rebooted using CTRL-ALT-DEL x2 again and was able to get into Mint.

Running systemctl | grep display shows the following;
systemctl | grep display
displaylink.service ... loaded active running DisplayLink Manager Service

Stopped displaylink.servce (systemctl stop displaylink.service), reconnected the USB adapter and it shows in lsusb again.

mlukaszek
08-17-2016, 09:33 AM
Sweet setup :)

You need DRM-compatible drivers for the GPU to work with DisplayLink. (so, proprietary drivers are unlikely to work fine - but maybe someone will give you some workarounds that would work).
Also, the kernel module is not signed, so you will need to disable secure boot or sign the module yourself.

Cheers,
Michal