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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 29/11/15 21:02, Omer Zak wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:1448823766.567.132.camel@zak.co.il"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
(1/9) Shachar Shemesh/Roman Ovseitsev:
Why connect internal monitor + 3 external monitors?
My response:
I was not clear in expressing my wishes.
What I'd like to be able is to work at home with three monitors. I do
not care if it is 3 external monitors (with disabled internal monitor)
or 2 external monitors with an active internal monitor.
Roman Ovseitsev's point about Skylake based laptop: not relevant since I
do not need more than 3 monitors total.
</pre>
</blockquote>
My laptop has a fairly basic adapter. I seem to recall, though I
have no idea when I tried, that only two monitors simulteneously are
supported. I'm fairly certain that this is a GPU memory issue,
though, as xrandr does list a hefty list of potential ports
(including, when docked, subdisplays of the display port).<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:1448823766.567.132.camel@zak.co.il"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
-=-=-=-=-=-
(2/9) Shachar Shemesh:
Recommends Dell, which has reasonable Linux support.
Uses Dell Latitude E7440.
My response:
What does "reasonable" mean here? Are there any features not well
supported by Linux?
Do other models in the E7000 series have as good reputation? If yes,
I'll check if any of them supports total of 3 displays.</pre>
</blockquote>
I can't think of anything that did not work for me, including
setting the track pad sensitivity, controlling the built in keyboard
backlight from the keyboard shortcut, and disabling/enabling the
trackpad from the keyboard shortcuts. Ubuntu 15.04 with kubuntu
proved somewhat unstable when docking/undocking (or, generally, when
adding and removing the external monitor). If you're willing to live
with "dock, set monitor state, logout and log in", then this is
nothing serious.<br>
<br>
I've also had trouble with the external monitor going blank when
docked sometimes. I've ended up swapping and swapping and swapping
hardware with others in the office, eventually blaming the
motherboard. Dell's support replaced it, and eventually the problem
was resolved (it has recently came back, but I havn't started the
hardware swapping debugging yet).<br>
<br>
So, all in all, I have not come across anything that did not work
for me. You don't even need Windows/Dos to upgrade the BIOS. Just
place the BIOS upgrade file (an .EXE) on the UEFI boot partition,
and use the BIOS boot menu to select "BIOS upgrade".<br>
<br>
There are some driver bugs, but nothing serious IMHO.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:1448823766.567.132.camel@zak.co.il"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
(5/9) Boris Shtrasman:
How about Legacy and UEFI (or only UEFI) mode?
My response:
UEFI should be OK, but I need to disable secure boot so that I'll be
able to upgrade Linux kernels at whim.
</pre>
</blockquote>
At least Ubuntu have a signed GRUB, which means that the kernels
need not be signed at all (which defeats the whole purpose of secure
UEFI, but that's Microsoft's problem, not ours). My laptop does, in
fact, support legacy boot, but I ended up using UEFI anyways (I
wanted to experiment with it). I did end up disabling the secure
UEFI boot, though I don't think I had to.<br>
<br>
One thing I did not expect was during motherboard replaement. With
UEFI the BIOS needs to know which OSes it is booting, which means
that merely replacing the BIOS and plugging in the same disk would
not boot. The BIOS has Windows preconfigured, but that's no help for
obvious reasons. You need to keep an Ubuntu DoK handy and do
recovery reinstall of GRUB to get the machine going again.<br>
<br>
Also, Ubuntu install has great difficulty to install a legacy boot
Ubuntu if the live DoK was booted in UEFI mode and vice versa. Keep
that in mind during initial installation.<br>
<br>
Their standard way to create the DoK these days is to take the ISO
and dd it on a DoK. This, suprisingly, creates a DoK that is
bootable in both legacy and UEFI mode. They managed to cram a
bootloader, a UEFI boot partition and an El Torrito boot loader in
to the same image.<br>
<br>
Shachar<br>
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