[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 […]
Notebooks.com is running a contest – “Tell us how you would use a DisplayLink USB video adapter.” Add your thoughts to the comments on their post, and they’ll enter you into a drawing that will be held after March 19th. While those free adapters aren’t quite as nice as ours here at Plugable, but they’d […]
Plugable’s new USB 2.0 Graphics Adapter is now available on Amazon.com. The DisplayLink DL-195 chip inside this adapter is the best high-end chip out there for adding a display over USB. And because it pushes USB 2.0 and analog VGA to their limits, it isn’t likely to be beaten by any other chip in the […]
The Plugable Universal Docking Station is getting some minor but nice upgrades to the latest chips for each function. All new units shipped from March 1, 2010 forward have these new features: Upgraded the DisplayLink DL-160 to the newer DL-165 Previous maximum resolution was 1680×1050, now 1920×1080 Moved from two 4-port NEC USB hubs internally […]
Attach your new Plugable USB graphics adapter to a Win 7 PC. What happens? .. driver is found and downloaded from Microsoft’s Windows Update system… … and a DisplayLink EULA and a bunch of screen flashes later … Windows 7 and a network connection takes care of it. No driver disk needed.
Windows 7 and Vista have Windows Update on by default, as do most recent Windows XP machines. So when a new USB device arrives, the system is able to go out to the Internet and check Microsoft’s huge library of drivers to find a match — a great plug and play experience for devices like […]
Here’s the result when you connect the Plugable UD-160-A universal laptop docking station to a completely fresh Windows 7 system: Windows automatically finds, downloads, and installs drivers for all the devices on the dock — the built-in USB C-Media audio, ASIX ethernet, DisplayLink graphics functions are all supported. *NO* driver disks to find, no web […]
In order to submit patches to the Linux kernel — as I’ve been doing lately to help improve Linux’s DisplayLink driver udlfb — the changed code has to pass a script called checkpatch.pl, which flags violations of the Linux kernel style guidelines. Style wars (e.g. “tabs vs. spaces”) are a never-ending source of tension on […]
There are limits on how much a small device company can and should do in contributing to open source driver support. But with a historical connection to DisplayLink and more products coming with the technology included, contributing what we can to the generic DisplayLink driver on Linux makes some sense. Also note this driver is […]
The Linux framebuffer interface has at least four different sets of APIs for rendering to the screen. Here they are mapped against the some important fbdev client “applications”. Description Linux console fbdev X server mplayer, fbi, some others fb_write and fb_read passes a buffer to copy to/from user no no no image_blit, fillrect, copyarea blit […]
