Plugable

Howto: ASIX 88178 USB Ethernet Adapter on Ubuntu 10.10 Linux

Posted on 18. Oct, 2010 by Bernie Thompson 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 Bernie Thompson 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.

DisplayLink Releases New Mac Driver Beta (1.6 Beta 3)

Posted on 29. Sep, 2010 by Bernie Thompson in UGA-2K-A

DisplayLink has released an updated beta of their version 1.6 Mac drivers, available for download from their Mac forums. This is the first update in quite a few months, so it’s a good sign for Mac users.

The main feature of the new beta are fixes for some problems experienced on resume from sleep.

In terms of our general recommendations for Macs and Plugable’s DisplayLink-based products, we still want to emphasize that all Mac drivers are of a beta/pre-release level of quality compared to the Windows products. They still 1) are incompatible with recent MacBook Pros with switching graphics 2) disable the USB ethernet interface on docking stations like our Plugable dock. 3) are too frequently broken or fixed by Apple’s OS X updates — Apple often seems to be changing driver interfaces in subtle ways that affect USB graphics.

We expect and hope that support from both DisplayLink and Apple will improve in time, and we’ll be able to recommend the combination without qualification. Until then, it’s good to see releases like this for incremental progress.