The US Congress is now considering legislation requiring sales tax collection for most online sales. Requiring sales tax for online purchases isn’t a bad thing. Unfortunately, the current legislation has the potential to kill small, online businesses — innovative companies like Sparkfun, Makerbot, Adafruit, and many more. These kinds of companies are America’s best hope […]
Unfortunately, Linux doesn’t support multiple graphics adapters the way Windows does, which means you can’t just plug in USB graphics adapters and expect them to extend your desktop (the good news is there is progress on this support). What is possible, however, is running a single DisplayLink adapter, or several with a Xinerama or multiseat […]
[updated 12/3 – DisplayLink has released driver version 5.5 M1 (Dec 3, 2010) which appears to resolve all these outstanding nVidia issues. See details … ] nVidia’s latest Win7/Vista drivers (October 18, 2010 and later) conflict with existing DisplayLink drivers (version 5.5 Sept 29th and earlier), causing video playback and some 3D applications to not […]
One of our customers is building a six monitor setup on their PC for stock trading and ESignal Qcharts. They asked: “What is the best Windows laptop and/or desktop to run six Plugable USB graphics adapters to get six monitors simultaneously on a single PC?” It’s a great question, because there are definitely ways to […]
The latest set of patches for udlfb, the Linux kernel framebuffer driver for DisplayLink chips, has been submitted and looks on track for kernel 2.6.37. This will catch the kernel up to everything on http://git.plugable.com/ Linux is a big and constantly shifting platform. With our USB graphics products (and generally for DisplayLink based products, since […]
[Update Jan 2011: Udlfb was promoted from the staging tree to the main kernel (in drivers/video/udlfb.c) in 2.6.38. See documentation in the kernel tree at Documentation/fb/udlfb.txt] A 10-part udlfb patch series with several enhancements were recently accepted into the Linux kernel staging tree of 2.6.34. Greg’s maintainer patch series passing them on starts here. This […]
[updated 8/14/2011 with latest udlfb info] The xorg generic fbdev driver (xf86-video-fbdev) supports rotation with a custom option (note it disables DGA and xrandr when it rotated mode). DisplayLink devices can use this driver two ways: With the udlfb fb_defio option enabled to detect framebuffer writes based on page faults With the fbdev xorg server […]
[Update Dec 29, 2011: udlfb was promoted from the staging to the mainline kernel tree in 2.6.38. And in kernel 3.3 pagefault detection and console are enabled by default. See all our udlfb posts for the latest news.] [Update March 14, 2010: udlfb versions have moved to being released with the Linux kernel. Update on […]
