HP DisplayLink docking station in Ubuntu

DisplayLink docking stations works really good in Ubuntu. A list of supported devices can be found here.

I had the possibility to try out with one from HP, and there was some additional steps except from installing the DisplayLink driver for Ubuntu that was necessary to get a good experience (at least for me).

Start by downloading the deb package for Ubuntu here. Extract and install:

cd ~/Downloads
unzip DisplayLink\ USB\ Graphics\ Software\ for\ Ubuntu\ 1.2.1.zip
sudo bash displaylink-driver-1.2.65.run

It is easiest to just reboot your computer after the installation is done. I usually don’t plugin the docking station until I get to lightdm login screen.

You might have to adjust the order of the monitors under System settings, Display you have more than one external monitor connected.

Every time the HP docking station is connected, it will mount a USB mass storage device, containing the Windows drivers. This is quite annoying, but it’s easy to fix by blacklisting it with a udev rule. I also wanted to blacklist the Ethernet interface, since it isn’t used (and also caused problems NetworkManager dropping the wireless connections sometimes).

For the version of the docking station I was using, the following two rules would take care of that:

sudo bash -c 'tee /etc/udev/rules.d/98-displaylink-ignore.rules <<EOF
# Disable displaylink (port replicator) ethernet device
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", DRIVER=="cdc_ncm", ATTRS{interface}=="HP USB Giga Ethernet", \
ATTR{authorized}="0"

# Disable displaylink (port replicator) usb disk
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1165", ATTRS{idVendor}=="048d", \
ATTRS{manufacturer}=="iTE Tech", ATTR{authorized}="0"
EOF'

As always, udevadm info -a -p and the corresponding sysfs class path for the device, is the way to find correct information for your particular device.

Reload the udev rules without restarting:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules