Thank you for contacting Plugable! I’m sorry the Ethernet port of the UD-6950Z isn’t working as expected, and I’ll be happy to assist.
Unfortunately since the UD-6950Z is not officially supported with Ubuntu our ability to fix this may be limited, but nevertheless we’ll do our best to help here. I should also mention there’s no firmware updates currently available for UD-6950Z.
The DisplayLink driver for Ubuntu only provides functionality for the video portion of the UD-6950Z, whereas the other functions of the dock (such as audio and Ethernet) use the standard drivers that are built into Ubuntu. As long as the operating system is up to date the correct driver should be present on the system.
In your message you did mention the OS is already up to date, but just to be sure I’d recommend running the following commands in the Terminal:
sudo apt-get update
followed by
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
This should ensure that the OS is up to date and the right drivers are available for use.
In case this does not work, I’d recommend performing a power cycle of the dock. This can often help resolve problems if any of the internal components are in an error state by allowing them to reset. To do this, please follow these steps:
Disconnect all USB peripherals connected to the dock
Disconnect docking station from host computer, then disconnect the dock’s power adapter from power
Leave unplugged for 1 minute for power to dissipate
Connect docking station initially into power only
Connect docking station to host machine, then connect USB peripherals and test for functionality
Lastly, it may also be worth testing the dock with another computer running a supported operating system (such as Windows 10, 11, or macOS) to see if the same Ethernet issues occur. Testing the dock with a known-supported setup should help determine if the problem may be with the dock itself, or with the software environment it’s currently being used in.
Please let me know if you have any questions as well.
My apologies for the trouble, and thank you for giving us the chance to help.
As stated the machine is already up to date and the dock was fully working on Ubuntu 20.04 just before. Considering this, I am pretty sure the dock would work fine on Windows laptops.
That being said, a power cycle of the dock in an interesting avenue; I will try it next Tuesday (my next working day). I the mean time, wifi is an acceptable (though less interesting) solution.
I saw firmware updates on some Plugable hardware, can you confirm there is no such thing on the UD-6950Z? It (firmware update) is a thing I am looking for when hardware behave in a weird way.
Thanks for your reply as well! Noted that the laptop is updated - I just like to double-check to be safe
I can confirm there’s no firmware updates currently available for UD-6950Z aside from what may be included with the DisplayLink driver installation (DisplayLink drivers may come with firmware updates for the DisplayLink chip within the dock). If you want to give this a try, you can find the latest Ubuntu-compatible driver from DisplayLink here: https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-usb-graphics-software-ubuntu-61?filetype=exe
Please do let me know how the power cycle steps go, and feel free to ask if you have any more questions!
