The OU is using Kensington DisplayLink docking stations. They’re pretty nifty: one USB plug gets you internet, audio, and video. Under windows, that is :s.
After googling a bit, it turns out that DisplayLink did not release any drivers for the USB 3.0 version for Linux. Why? Because they support HDCP, a copy-protection measure for displays. And they have not (yet?) figured out how to preserve that type of copy protection and have open source drivers (nor, apparently, preserving that with closed-source drivers).
There’s at least one person looking into getting USB3 DisplayLink working via Linux. And it kind of sounds like he’s trying to hack HDCP in the process, just because he wants to use his hardware to actually do something. Ugh.
UPDATE (2017-02-07): Woohoo! Solution! There’s an Ubuntu display driver available from Displaylink. See http://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/684649-how-to-install-displaylink-software-on-ubuntu. It requires kernel v3.16, which you can get from Ubuntu 14.04.2 onwards. (Thanks to new colleague Fabian for finding this out!).
In a nutshell:
- Make sure you’re running linux kernel 3.16 or above
- Download driver-installer
- Install a signed kernel, boot into signed kernel
sudo apt-get install linux-signed-generic-lts-$VERSION – currently, version is “xenial” but you can check which is the latest by using filename completion (i.e., press <Tab>) and picking the newest one. - Install DKMS: sudo apt-get install dkms
- Execute the downloaded installer:
sudo ./displaylink-driver-$version.run - Unplug your monitor cable and give the system 10-20 sec to resetup the monitor via the USB3 port.
Sidenote:
Using the actual USB3 port on my system instead of a USB2 port increases the speed sufficiently to allow internet, sound, webcam and display all over one port. In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious that even just running internet and sound over it would become challenging for video conferencing. Great detecting there, Sherlock me.
Update 2017-02-17: If you’re updating the kernel, the installed driver might no longer work (happened to me). In that case: sudo displaylink-installer uninstall to remove the driver, reboot, reinstall the driver by sudo ./displaylink-driver-$version.run and you’re good to go again!
You don’t even need to reboot after reinstalling the driver.
I’m not sure if you need to reboot at all, but I figured better 20 secs extra and sure about having purged the previous install than lingering in limbo.
Thanks to:
– http://displaylink.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1748&page=16
– http://airlied.livejournal.com/80516.html