How Well Does the New MacBook Air Work with DisplayLink?

Posted on 20. Oct, 2010 by in UGA-2K-A

DisplayLink USB 2.0 graphics adapters are the easiest way to get multiple monitors attached to a laptop, especially one with limited connectivity. USB is ubiquitous, and you can always add an inexpensive USB hub to get more ports.

But compatibility with the Mac has been hit-and-miss. Mac OS has no special support for USB graphics – so DisplayLink’s drivers have to do quite a bit of work to integrate with the OS. And Apple’s new OS updates and platforms have sometimes broken the drivers, requiring another update from DisplayLink to set things right.

In particular, in the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro models introduced in 2010, Apple added hybrid switching Intel/nVidia graphics for power management purposes. The OS switches between them depending on whether lower power (Intel) or higher 3D performance (nVidia GeForce GT 330M) is called for. Unfortunately, that switching conflicts with USB graphics in Mac OS X in significant ways that DisplayLink has been unable to solve. As a workaround, users with these MacBooks can turn off graphics switching in the control panel.

On the bright side, with the 13″ MacBook Pro, Apple moved entirely to using nVidia’s latest low-power chipset, the GeForce 320M, which both is 1) an all-in-one non-switching solution and 2) makes use of integrated memory, which is a good match for USB graphics. This MacBook Pro doesn’t have the compatibility problems of the 15″ and 17″ versions.

The new MacBook Air, announced today, now too is potentially a great match for USB graphics – a small and light notebook for travel, but with the ability to connect many devices and up to 4 independent displays (one USB graphics adapter per display), all via inexpensive USB 2.0 hubs to expand beyond the two built-in ports.

But what about compatibility?

Fortunately, Apple has announced that the new MacBook Air uses the same nVidia GeForce 320M graphics solution as the MacBook Pro 13″ model, so the compatibility story should be the same. Just make sure to use DisplayLink’s latest 1.6 beta 3 drivers or newer, for full 64-bit OS support and the latest fixes.

This is based solely on the specs for now – hopefully we’ll get a newly minted Macbook Air owner to post here with their experiences. And again, for Mac OS X these are beta drivers for now, so only somewhat adventurous users should jump in to experience any of this multi-monitor madness.

Howto: ASIX 88178 USB Ethernet Adapter on Ubuntu 10.10 Linux

Posted on 18. Oct, 2010 by in Using

[update Dec 2011: Linux kernel 3.2 rc3 and later "just work" and don't need the fix described below]

Support for these devices has been in the Linux kernel since kernel 2.6.21 (file /drivers/usb/net/asix.c). However, this driver fails to find an IP address, and comes up “disconnected”

To get the adapter working, we need to download, compile, and install the latest driver available from ASIX for the AX88X family. This driver is compatible with kernels 2.6.14+

Steps

Assumes you have another net connection on this machine. Download the driver on another machine and copy over if not.

mkdir asix
cd asix
wget http://www.asix.com.tw/FrootAttach/driver/AX88772B_772A_760_772_178_LINUX2.6.35_Driver_v3.5.0_Source.tar.bz2
tar xvjf *
sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo module-assistant prepare
sudo modprobe -r asix
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe asix

Your USB network interface should now come up automatically.

These instructions have been written for our Plugable USB2-E1000 USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter, but should apply to any ASIX adapter with an ASIX AX88178 USB Ethernet controller and Realtek RTL8211CL PHY, which reports ASIX’s USB IDs VID_0B95 & PID_1780.

The steps should work identically on older Ubuntu kernel versions. It was also tested on Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28.10. Comment here if you have any trouble, and we’ll try to figure it out.

Common errors

Before this update of the driver, the common errors you’ll see typically show up as a timeout trying to get an IP address from DHCP. You’ll see messages like

“no ipv6 routers present” in dmesg and /var/log/kern.log

And in /var/log/syslog:
“DHCP transaction took too long (>45s), stopping it”
“Marking connection ‘Auto eth1′ invalid”

Again, this update of the ‘asix’ kernel module should resolve these errors. For the future, hopefully the in-kernel ASIX driver will get patches to catch it up with the driver source available directly from ASIX.

DisplayLink Releases Updated Windows Driver (version 5.5)

Posted on 01. Oct, 2010 by in Windows

DisplayLink has released an updated Windows Driver (version 5.5, dated September 29th, 2010), which is available for download here.

This update is compatible with all of Plugable’s products with DisplayLink-based USB graphics.

This is a must-have update for all with machines with ATI/AMD as their primary graphics controller, as it works around serious issues introduced with ATI’s Catalyst™ 10.8 driver release. ATI’s driver was released just recently (August). ATI has not pushed this update widely, but over time we expect more ATI/AMD users will need to make sure they’re running DisplayLink driver version 5.5 or later.

In terms of new features, DisplayLink’s version 5.5 driver also includes:

  • Windows Presentation Foundation compatibility on Windows XP — a big deal for XP users who use Visual Studio 2010 or any of the other (limited but growing) list of applications built on WPF
  • ‘Fit to TV’ functionality for HDMI TVs
  • GUI menu enhancements
  • Some improvements in motion video playback performance on Windows 7 and Vista

See the 5.5 release notes for details.

Page 5 of 14« First...34567...10...Last »