kylelang/displaylink-driver

Disclaimer

Neither any of the following information nor the contents of this repository are intended for use by third parties. I'm putting this stuff here to document the process of getting the DisplayLink driver installed on my machine and (hopefully) save future Kyle some pain and suffering.

Of course, you are perfectly free to use this stuff, if you want. You do so at your own risk, though.

Install Notes

Date: 2023-03-31

Machine: ThinkPad T14s Gen3 AMD

OS: Debian 12 (Bookworm, Testing)

Situation/Problem Statement

• I could not install via the automated installing script from displaylink-debian
  • The autoinstall of EVDI failed
• I could not manually install EVDI from the GitHub source
  • Could not find the drm.h header to include
• I was able to manually install EVDI from the GitHub source by adding a symlink to /usr/include/libdrm in the module directory so drm.h would be found
• After the above, neither the diplaylink-debian or DisplayLink install scripts would work.
  • The DisplayLink::displaylink-installer.sh script (which is also called by displaylink-debian::displaylink-debian.sh) forced installation of its bundled version of EVDI (v1.12.0) which contained the same includes bug from above.
  • I was able to trick the script into running by replacing the bundled evdi.tar.gz with one containing the source for my successful install.
    • I think this works because diplaylink-installer.sh gets the EVDI version number from the modules/dkms.conf file in the bundled tarball.
    • This number is then supplied to dkms install to check if the correct version of EVDI is already installed.
    • If the correct version of EVDI is installed, the forced EVDI install is aborted and the rest of the script executes successfully.

Steps

EVDI

1. Clone EVDI source from https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi.
2. Add symlink evdi/module/drm.h -> /usr/include/libdrm/drm.h
3. Build the EVDI DKMS module a. dkms add evdi/1.13.1 a. dkms build evdi/1.13.1 a. dkms install evdi/1.13.1

DisplayLink Driver

1. Download the Ubuntu driver package from https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/downloads/ubuntu
2. Extract the driver components via `./displaylink-driver-5.16.1.run --noexec --keep
3. Replace displaylink-driver-5.16.1/evdi.tar.gz with a version containing the newer files from above
4. Run displaylink-driver-5.16.1/displaylink-installer.sh.

Licensing Note

The MIT license attached to this repository applies only to my contributions. The DisplayLink driver components are subject to the licensing terms applied by synaptics (which are not clear to me).