Installing Displaylink drivers on Fedora 37

I have an Asus ZenScreen MB16AC which uses Displaylink as its display technology. On usb-c you can just plug this in and it’ll work, but on my ancient laptop I only have usb-a ports. The display does come with an USB-A to USB-C convertor - so let’s try ;)

After plugging the display helpfully told me it couldn’t detect any DisplayLink support, and switched off. Heh.

After some digging I found the way to get this to work:

• Install RPMFusion
• Install RPMSphere (for evdi)

• Install the evdi package:

  sudo dnf install evdi
  

At this point the build will fail because of compatibility issues with the latest packaged version of evdi and the 6.x linux kernels. Patches are available, and the master branch also works.

• Clone the latest master branch of https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi and use its version of the evdi source

  git clone https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi
  cd evdi
  sudo cp evdi/module/* /usr/src/evdi-1.12.0
  

• Rebuild the evdi module

  sudo dkms build -m evdi -v 1.12.0 --force
  sudo dkms install -m evdi -v 1.12.0
  

Next, to get the displaylink driver:

• download the official Ubuntu driver from https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/downloads/ubuntu somewhere. /tmp for instance.
• install it:

  Before executing displaylink-installer.sh you should review that it does not do anything nefarious!

  unzip DisplayLink\ USB\ Graphics\ Software\ for\ Ubuntu5.6.1-EXE.zip
  chmod +x displaylink-driver-5.6.1-59.184.run
  ./displaylink-driver-5.6.1-59.184.run --target DL-extracted --noexec
  cd DL-extracted
  sudo ./displaylink-installer.sh
  

Et voila.