UPDATE [August 9, 2021]: It turns out DisplayLink doesn’t quite work in 21.04. See this blog posting for the latest on how to work around the remaining issue.
Thanks to Peter Boros for pointing out that Canonical and Synaptics have made the fixes necessary to make DisplayLink work with Ubuntu 21.04 without any of the fixes I’ve posted. I was unaware of this because, unfortunately, Canonical did not update any of the bugs I’ve filed about this to indicate that the issue was fixed, and Synaptics did not announce the new release of their software or update the Ubuntu download page to indicate that it’s compatible with 21.04. 🤷
If you’ve installed my fixes on your Ubuntu 21.04 box to make it work with DisplayLink, here’s what you should do to undo them:
- Download the current DisplayLink Ubuntu installer from here.
- Unzip it.
- Run “
bash displaylink-driver-*.run --noexec --keep --target dl-installer“. Do this in a persistent directory like your Desktop or something, not in/tmp, because you’re going to need these files still after you’ve rebooted, and rebooting clears/tmpon Ubuntu. - Make sure you’ve got a monitor plugged directly into your computer, not into your DisplayLink hub, or proceed in an SSH session into your computer from a different one.
- Switch directories to the
dl-installerdirectory and run”sudo bash displaylink-installer.sh uninstall“. - Download the script below as
hirsute-unfix-displaylink.shand runsudo bash -e hirsute-unfix-displaylink.sh. - Reboot and log in again.
- If you’re working directly on your computer rather than through an SSH session, make sure your keyboard and mouse are plugged directly into your computer rather than your DisplayLink hub, because you can’t install the DisplayLink driver when the hub is plugged in.
- Switch into the
dl-installerdirectory again and run “sudo bash displaylink-installer.sh install“. - Reboot.
At this point DisplayLink should be working, and you can delete all of the installers and scripts that you downloaded or unpacked.
Note that this uses the evdi shared library and kernel module shipped with the DisplayLink installer, not the ones shipped with Ubuntu.
Here’s the hirsute-unfix-displaylink.sh script:
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Thank you very much for this series of blog posts. Any thoughts on being able to connect/disconnect the external DL device while the system is running? At the moment if I disconnect, my primary laptop screen goes black. Have you run into this at all?
Do you mean that it goes black briefly when you unplug and then recovers, or goes black until you reboot or something? I’ve definitely seen it happen briefly but haven’t seen it last more than a few seconds on either macOS or Linux.
Black until I force a reboot with the power button.
Well, this is quite nice news that DP is now working on 21.04.
The main problem with article itself is that instead of explaining what should be done with “good packages” and what they are you only give a script (that doesn’t work on my system) that does something. I do agree that it’s way easier to run a script and forget about it… if the script in question works. And when it isn’t the explanation of what is what and what must be done can truly amend it.
Just for reference: 21.04 lives on 5.11 kernel…
Anyway, thanks a lot! Twiddling a bit around I managed to make script work… Dunno if it works right, of course…
Interestingly, this still doesn’t work for me. The install completes, but the module it installs is broken. Manually trying to start it with modprobe will give an error `modprobe: ERROR: could not insert ‘evdi’: Exec format error`
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