I am very interested in the universal docking station for my laptop. However, I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 on my Alienware m15x, so I’m a little concerned about getting everything to work correctly. I’m afraid that I’ll get halfway through and find out it just won’t work with my hardware. Has anyone had success with this setup? Can I return it if things just don’t work out?
Thanks for the quick reply. I’ll keep an eye on things and be the first in line when it’s ready.
Hi - Ubuntu 10.04 will detect and load an open source kernel framebuffer driver on all of Plugable’s USB graphics products (all DisplayLink based).
However, getting X to work on a framebuffer and a GPU to create an extended desktop is more difficult. It requires going back to the bad old days of manual xorg.conf editing to tie together the main graphics and the USB graphics. It’s not easy or pretty.
And most reports we’ve seen of getting it working, are on Intel GPUs, e.g.: http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/201…
(These instructions are on a USB mini-mon, but would apply similarly to our products).
So, for “normal” users, we’d recommend against buying our USB graphics products for use on a generic Linux distro, especially on a non-Intel GPU system, until X gets multi-adapter support, and USB graphics controllers are detected and configured for X automatically, as PCI GPUs are today. That’s not in Ubuntu 10.04, and it’s probably a ways out yet.
We do want to avoid returns, if possible, as they’re costly for everyone.
Sorry for the bad news - but thanks very much for your interest, though. We hope someday, Linux also is able to configure USB displays completely automatically. We’ve been trying to do our part to help make that happen: http://plugable.com/category/project/…
Best wishes,
Bernie