DisplayLink support in Ubuntu Linux

Responses

1. 

   Asa says on January 12, 2009, 11:14 am

   I asked the guy at the DisplayLink booth at CES about Linux support and he said that they haven’t added Linux support because they believe it to be a sub-1% market and that if they had more demand for it they would add it. Netbooks might have changed their view on Linux support, but he said most people buying netbooks are opting for Windows XP instead of Linux.

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2. 

   Chris says on January 22, 2009, 8:00 am

   … a friend of mine and I have started reverse engineering the protocol, and made some progress during the xmas holidays. The encryption is broken and the basic memory access routines are known.

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3. 

   Dreamer_uk says on January 29, 2009, 10:40 am

   Plesae keep us uptodate with any website to test this my displaylink monitor is due next week, i will be trying their windows software via wine in the short term.

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4. 

   Adam Williamson says on January 29, 2009, 8:11 pm

   Chris: it would be great if you’d set up a site (either independent or on sourceforge or something) to track your work and make sure the project is not lost through the cracks. Also you could announce the project on the X.org mailing lists, you may well find some developers willing to help you out there. More public projects with more eyeballs always tend to work out better

   I looked into this a while ago; from what I could find, I believe DisplayLink actually hired an X.org developer on contract to write a driver initially, but I found no later reference to that and he did not return my emails, so I suspect they found it was more complex than they initially supposed, and canned the project. Since then, your post is the first indication I’ve seen that anyone’s working on this.

   It’s definitely something that’s sorely needed, so if you get this out into the public, you may well find a base of testers and contributors. Good luck.

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5. 

   gerry says on January 30, 2009, 3:15 am

   Hi Chris, I agree with Adam. If people see that something has started in putting DisplayLink support under Linux the better chances you’d get some help.

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6. 

   Julian says on February 4, 2009, 3:36 pm

   Hi Chris, indeed you should make your progress public. I am not that skilled in driver development but I’d love to help.

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7. 

   Dario says on February 6, 2009, 5:59 am

   They have set-up a web page here:

   http://floe.butterbrot.org/displaylink/doku.php

   Information on their first proof-of-concent in this mailing list message:

   http://kerneltrap.org/index.php?q=mailarchive/linux-usb/2009/1/9/4662974/thread

   Hope they get something usable soon

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8. 

   KGWagner says on July 15, 2009, 2:45 am

   Apparently, work progresses on displaylink drivers – there’s a blurb on it at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzMyMA for those interested.

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