Installing DisplayLink drivers under Gentoo Linux
One of my computer displays broke recently. Because I am a digital nomad, I'm moving houses every two weeks to one month. My displays go in the back of my car, enclosed with towels for protection. Unfortunately, my sometimes sporty driving combined with my new suitcase in the same back of my car broke one of the displays. So I decided to buy a new display, a portable one this time. It came down to an AOC E1759Fwu.
After Googling a lot, I found out DisplayLink has only provided drivers for Ubuntu. However, they also seem to work on Gentoo with a few tweaks. To install it, first download the DisplayLink drivers for Ubuntu 16.04 from http://www.displaylink.com/. Then on Gentoo, run the following commands as root (run "sudo -i" first if you're not):
- emerge layman lsb-release
- layman -a rage
- emerge dkms
- ln -s /usr/lib64/systemd /lib64/systemd
- Run the downloaded DisplayLink drivers executable ending in .run
If all goes well, you can then start the whole DisplayLink stuff on boot and now with:
- systemctl enable dlm
- systemctl start dlm
Then, as I read on the ArchLinux Wiki, as a normal user, check that there is a second RandR provider, which can be shown with "xrandr --listproviders". Then, link provider 1 to the default provider 0 by running "xrandr --setprovideroutputsource 1 0". Checking with "xrandr -q" should yield another DVI screen, which can then be configured as usual using xrandr. Enjoy!