DisplayLink strikes again

A year ago, I had (nearly) the same issue, so I looked that up. I updated my laptop, and also the kernel packages to v6.18.2. This time I didn't forget to update the "-headers" package, but after rebooting, the external monitor didn't worked. Followed the same troubleshooting as the previous time. And it was the same, evdi didn't get compiled/build/maked for the new kernel.

Well... Actually, the package didn't existed anymore in the repository... So I couldn't just update them to the latest and hope that it will work... it got renamed to "evdi-dkms". While trying to update evdi to evdi-dkms, displaylink package was blocking it... for some reason...(probably, it depends on evdi, so pacman tried to remove evdi before installing evdi-dkms, so it got confused...)

The fix was to remove evdi AND displaylink completely. And reinstall the new packages.

sudo pacman -R evdi displaylink
sudo pacman -S evdi displaylink

The removed packages are displaylink-6.2-1 and evdi-1.14.10-1. The installed packages are displaylink-6.2-1 and evdi-dkms-1.14.11-2.

Also I entered exactly the command above, so it's not a typo, I entered evdi and pacman installed evdi-dkms, I guess it is also aliased to the correct package, which is great :)

Removing and reinstaling (the same version of) displaylink was the easiest way, instead of updating evdi (renamed) package and trying to fix the conflicts.

After installing is done, just stop and restart the displaylink service and the monitor will work again.

sudo systemctl stop displaylink.service
sudo systemctl start displaylink.service

In my previous post about this issue, I refered to myseld to write down how I feel towards displaylink. So here it is:

I hate to install additional packages to just use a hub, to extend and use another monitor... The previous hub I used, didn't required that I install extra drivers to just be able to use external monitors. It just worked, the reason I changed to this one was, that it didn't supported multiple screens with different resolutions, but it never consumed too much cpu power, I didn't needed aur/yay to install a driver. The most frustrating part is that an update can just make you lose a couple hours extra after the "actual" update process... because the package is not available anymore, or they renamed it to make it "more consistent"... Ok, ok, I do admit, I liked it the evdi and displaylink packages are moved to main repository instead of aur, which kind of increases the feeling of trust, and also that it works with the latest kernel(I didn't payed attention, but, apparently, I was using an old kernel, which I also noticed during this fix, so I updated that also).

Kind regards