Monday, March 23, 2020

Lenovo dual DVI usb 3.0 dock and Ubuntu


I got this Lenovo dual dvi usb 3.0 dock and thought I'd see if I could get it running with my Ubuntu 19.10 laptop.

After getting the drivers from displaylink, I gave it a try. What I noticed was that I'd get weird pointer trails and the display wouldn't update perfectly.

I hooked up my 50" tv to the DVI on the dock with a DVI to HDMI cable. But half the time I'd activate the TV, the computer would just freeze.

I gave up on it for awhile, but then realized that if I had the TV on when I started up the computer, everything was fine, no pointer trails and no crashes.


So now I've got 2 monitors on the lenovo displaylink dock, and 2 monitors off the laptop's outputs (HDMI and VGA) plus the laptop's own monitor (the 3 running off the integrated intel graphics).





5 total monitors works pretty nicely. Just remember to have the monitors on the displaylink turned on when you boot.



The only thing that's irritating now is that when I boot with the dock, ubuntu switches the audio volume controls to the dock. I still get audio output from the laptop but I can't control the volume until I set the audio output back to the built-in. It'd be cool to be able to "lock" the audio to a specific output and prefer that setting.

Also TVs tend to shut themselves off when they have no signal from power saving, and every time I turn the TV back on, the video system detects this and all the screens go black for a moment. Here's another case where it'd be good to have a mode where it wouldn't try to do anything when a new monitor gets detected, just leave things the way they were.

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