So there’s this dock sitting around that my son uses on his windows laptop. I’ve never tried to use it with my own laptop when running winblows, but now it’s running Ubuntu, and I must test the waters. Can I make it work?
Well sure I can!
I started by plugging the laptop into the dock (or the dock into the laptop, whatever), which is a USB connection. To my surprise, the mouse and keyboard came alive immediately! However, the monitors stayed dark. So, to Google I went.
Long story short, I found that this dock supports “DisplayLink“, which apparently is a Synaptics thing. A little more digging and I homed in on a DisplayLink driver for Ubuntu. I have documented what I did on my new Ubuntu on a Laptop notepad, so I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice to say, however, that once I loaded the driver and did all the things™, the monitors fired up and the network is reachable via the USB tether to the dock! So incredibly sick!
So incredibly sick!
Now I have triple monitor goodness at my disposal, until my son kicks me off his dock to do work things™.
Pretty sweet!