[Libdlo] Ubuntu with DisplayLink

Mulchman mulchman at gmail.com
Tue Mar 9 14:53:49 PST 2010


On 3/8/2010 18:47, Bernie Thompson wrote:
> Sorry, unfortunately I don't have any helpful insights on X configuration.
>

X configuration is indeed the hardest part.  Since you're on Ubuntu you
may want to look into booting into the recovery console and then
selecting the normal boot method which drops you at a console.  You can
then log in as your normal user and start/stop X at will until you've
nailed down the xorg.conf (just note the third caveat I mention below as
I wasted a bunch of time on it) and then finally do a reboot and boot
normally.  (Unless you have another OS installed you'll probably have to
modify the grub 2 config file to allow the boot menu to show, too.)

A couple caveats that I've noticed:
* the non-DisplayLink device needs to have a "BusId" entry in its
"Device" section (you can get this through lspci) in xorg.conf (thanks
to B. Douglas Hilton)
* if you manually start/stop the X server (like via startx or some other
means - as it's quicker to test/debug things this way) then Patrick
Gilmore's snippet that goes after the gdmwhich() function in
/etc/gdm/Init/Default won't help get menus/toolbars to appear at all
(and you may waste a bunch of time trying to figure out why like I
did).  A normal start - where the gdm user starts X - makes this work
just fine, though.
* make sure to have the right /dev/fb* to supply to the "Device" section
of the DisplayLink device in xorg.conf (Ubuntu 9.10 by default already
had /dev/fb0 in my case and when attaching the DisplayLink device
/dev/fb1 was created [but on other distros I've used the DisplayLink
device was always /dev/fb0])

I just recently [today, actually] got my DisplayLink device working on
Ubuntu 9.10 (32 bit): http://mulchman.org/blog/?p=90 mainly by using
various posts and links found on this list.


More information about the Libdlo mailing list