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External Display on HP USB-C Dock not working (feddit.org)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi,

I have this HP USB-C Dock but I don’t get the display ports working. The external display is not recognized by my Arch Notebook.

Do I need special drivers to use such docking stations?

(USB and Ethernet ports are working fine)

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

The issue is the dock itself which may need drivers.

Looking online it seems to have drivers for Windows. It doesn't look like HP provide driver for Linux for this.

The problem is to do with display over USB. If you plug a display device directly into a USB-c port in your notebook then it should work as USB-C supports display port directly (display port alternative mode) and this is in the Linux kernel.

However if you plug in a USB hub, then you're dependent on the hub device which is running as a USB device. If it has very good hardware then it might effectively be running more true USB-c ports but it could also (and kuch more likely) rely on drivers like DisplayLink to allow it to run a display over USB.

DisplayLink is proprietary and not in the Linux kernel to my knowledge. You could look to enable DisplayLink drivers in your Arch set up. There is a guide on the Wiki but it is described as experimental. There are official Display Link drivers for Linux (from Synaptics) but only officially released for Ubuntu, so support is patchy.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DisplayLink

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What you describe here makes totally sense, since every time I plug a windows device to this docking station a pop up is telling me, that display link drivers are going to be installed…

Maybe I should dig into this display link topic.

Thanks!

[–] raldone01 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Displaylink works on arch. Just install evdi and displaylink from the aur. Enable the service and also use the linux-lts kernel. EVDI is unfortunately an out of tree kernel module and lags behind the usually very recent official arch kernel.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

not forgetting linux-header and dkms ;)

Works directly after rebooting the Notebook.

Thanks!