The Braindump Blog

Making an external monitor connected via a hub work in Linux Mint

· Braindump

One thing I didn’t particularly expect during my latest transition to Linux is that whilst my laptop would work fine with an external screen if I plugged the laptop directly into the screen, the computer wouldn’t detect or use it if I used my usual setup, which is computer -> usb cable -> hub -> hdmi cable -> screen.

It turns out one may need a “DisplayLink driver for the hub to work. For my Targus hub on Linux Mint, what worked well was:

  1. Go to Synaptic’s Ubuntu Driver Download page.
  2. Scroll down to find the “Download” button in the section labelled Synaptics APT Repository and download the “synaptics-repository-keyring.deb” file it offers .
  3. Then open terminal and run these 3 commands in sequence.
sudo apt install ./Downloads/synaptics-repository-keyring.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install displaylink-driver

That’s assuming your file downloaded into the Downloads subfolder. Obviously change the path in the first if it did not.