Displaylink Docking Station
Docking station is very comfortable when you want to connect large monitors and external hard disk, keyboards and additional usb devices to your laptop/notebook. This will expand the capability of your notebook or laptop to the next level and feels very comfortable working with a work station model setup. I have made such setup for my Dell Inspiron 7000 series notebook and its works great in my Ubuntu OS.
Most of the docking station is the implementation of Displaylink www.displaylink.com and this works great with Ubuntu and Windows. For Windows 10 it will work out of the box and you dont need to install any drivers, as windows will automatically install the drivers once you plug it into the machine. But for Ubuntu/Linux operating system you may need to download driver from displaylink site and install it to make it work. Follow below instructions to install it on Ubuntu.
I have used Dell USB 3.0 Triple Display UltraHD Universal Dock (D3100) bought from amazon.com and its works great after tuning few configuration changes. Literally speaking any docking station models with Displaylink implementation would work on Ubuntu. you can get supported device models from link http://www.displaylink.com/products/universal-docking-stations
After install you may face few known issues in Ubuntu, follow bottom of the page to see how to solve those issues and make it work great.
Download Displaylink
Download Displaylink from http://www.displaylink.com/downloads/ubuntu
Extract the downloaded zip as shown below
After extraction it will show only one .run file which we need to run from Terminal CLI (Command Line Interface). Copy the location path as show below
Update nvidia with tested driver
Goto Software and Updates app -> Additional drivers -> Select tested Nvidia driver -> apply
After this open Nvidia and select Intel GPU
Uninstall if Display link is Already installed
sudo displaylink-installer uninstall
Update system with necessary packages and install
sudo apt-get install dkms sudo apt-get update cd to package path sudo chmod 777 *.run sudo ./display*.run
Installing Displaylink package in Ubuntu Linux may not work properly and you may face some issue. We are also covering how to debug those issues and how to run displaylink on your Ubuntu workstation smoothly. Please follow our next Article on Displaylink Debug below.