Ubuntu 16.10: 2-3 power on and offs needed, to make the displays work on my laptop
 

Dear DisplayLink team,

firstly I want to thank for the good hardware. I am using the Dell DisplayLink 3100 docking station, which is plugged on a laptop. If I managed to make them work by a few restarts, they are helping me at work.

Description of my issue:
After I press the power on button of my laptop, I cannot login into Ubuntu 16.10. The login form is displayed correctly and the displays are showing the background image of my desktop correctly. However, after I submit the login form, all displays are frozen. I need to hit the power off button of my laptop and start the machine again. Afterwards I need to submit the form again. Sometimes the displays are initialized correctly then and sometimes they do not. Usually I need 2-3 laptop restarts, to login into a user session, where the displays are initialized correctly.

After I get a correctly working user session, the screens are "sometimes" frozen, when I click on the settings button. Then I need to hit the power off button of my laptop again and the process from above starts again.

Attached is the zip-file, which has been generated by the "DisplayLink Linux Support Tool (1.2.17)" - the 64 bit version. I am using the Nvidia open source driver (Nouveau), since the proprietary driver from Nvidia is not supported.

Please let me know, what I can do to fix my issue.

Try to power-on laptop with dock-station powered-off. Then after login power-on dock station and see if this help.

I have tried this. The screens are not recognized, if I switch on the docking station with 2 screens attached after the operating system is fully started after user login. As soon I click on the system settings icon from Ubuntu 16.10, the entire system is freezing. I have already waited several minutes, but there is no "come back".

I have tried also to "find" the screens via these commands with no luck:

No signal is being sent to the screens.

I must say that the dockingstation with the display link driver works really bad for end-customers with no deep graphic driver knowledge on my end. The support here is also sparse. There will be rarely that much patient customers like me, which will spent hours in "try and error and google searching" in the hope of getting this docking station (D3100 from DELL) to work.

What could block the system to startup, having two screens connected via the docking station? After a few restarts the system starts though.

I have tried again to start my computer with the docking station, 2 screens attached and the nouveau + display link driver installed. Because I have updated all my packages with "sudo apt upgrade". However my system is not even coming up by 5 system restarts. I see no Ubuntu 16.10 login mask. Just a black screen. The system is frozen. Tried also several different USB 3.0 ports.

Could this messages from dmsg (kernel log) have anything to do with the issue? This would be also related to http://displaylink.org/forum/showthread.php?t=64925.

Well, may I will not be just ignored in this forum and someone could provide some support. This would be appreciated.

Finally I have kind of positiv information. I will watch it a bit, but it looks that if my system is fully started and the processor has begun to idle, it is able to make the docking station work. So I am just waiting for my startup programs to be started and then I am connecting the docking station via USB 3.0. Afterwards the displays get the signal and the system works for the entire day. It seems that the CPU cannot handle that much at the startup (not a weak CPU - it is an i7 one from a brand new laptop in the 1.300 EUR price range). My laptop has a graphics unit in the cpu and a graphics card.

However I have still 2-3 restarts, when the docking station is "not" connected to my laptop, before I can properly login to Ubuntu. This seems more like an issue with the Nouveau driver. But it is really hard to figure out what could be the issue and what can be done to prevent that. Any help from a grafic cards expert would be really appreciated!

It really looks like an Nouveau driver issue. After I boot the machine, login into Ubuntu, the CPU is ideling, I connect my docking station, everything works. So this issue has nothing to do with the DisplayLink driver and the docking station.

The Nouveau driver causes the need of 2-4 restarts of the system, until I can properly start. Does anybody know any fixes of Nouveau issues here? I was already investigating by googling around, checking the logs, but this seems like a deep topic.

A workaround for the need for multiple restarts in case of startup after an new start of the laptop, is simply to "never" fully shut down the laptop. Instead the laptop can go into sleep mode. So the operating systems stays booted and there is no struggle with the Nouveau driver at startup.

However.. the nature of a laptop is it's mobility purpose. If I disconnect my laptop from the docking station and connect the docking station again, the system freezes. Afterwards the restart struggle begins anew.

For this I suggest to switch to the proprietary Nvidia driver (e.g. at traveling). Because nvidia's own driver has no startup issues like the open-source reverse engineered Nouveau driver. I assume that the issue is tied to laptops with a cpu graphical component and an external graphics card from Nvidia like mine.

If anybody knows how the Nouveau issue can be solved "clean": please share..