How do I use Lubuntu on Dell Latitude E6410 laptop
 

Hi,

Yesterday, I decided to take open source road for good on my personal laptop. Since I didn't want bloat, I went for Lubuntu. Also because I liked the ease of the installer. Anyway, when I installed Lubuntu, my laptop was undocked because it was done at the office. Everything went well and tried it for a few minutes then brought it home. At home, the laptop is going to be docked, lid closed with 2 external monitors. Well, that's where I hit a huge wall. I docked the laptop, powered it on and nothing showed onscreen. Both monitors blank. So I opened the laptop, and its screen was blank too. Held down the power button to do a hard shutdown and powered it back on with the lid open. This time the monitors did come on but all I got was a mouse cursor in the middle of the screen. I'm going to continue looking for answers but wanted to start a thread here for future reference and to get your feedback/advice. Thank you.

What happens if, at home, you boot undocked then dock the laptop?

Hi...

Also, what is your laptop brand and model (and model number?) Please open a terminal and post the results of...

Nice Verse, by the way. ;)

Regards...

Hi. At work for another hour. I will post back when at home. Thank you.

Wonder if the dock has a different video card?

See if alt-2 or other terminal will pull up terminal shell.

As a test, try plugging one of the external monitors directly into the laptop if it has a socket and checking whether it is detected. If it is, that will identify the docking bay as the primary suspect.

Also, check for a hardware key to activate the external monitor connection; all my Dells have had one, usually on one of the function keys with a little picture intended to represent a laptop screen and a monitor side by side.

The dock is just a port replicator and from the laptop's Windows days, I remember that it can only drive 2 displays at time: laptop + 1 external or laptop closed with 2 external.

Well, turned on the laptop undocked and everything works fine. Docked it and nothing on the external display, though it did find the wireless keyboard & mouse and the wired connection right away. Tried the Fn + F8 key combo to switch to external and nothing happened. Went ahead and rebooted while docked, all I got was a plain login screen with a non-responsive mouse cursor in the middle. Did a Ctrl-Alt F1, got a terminal window, logged in, and issued a poweroff command, then undocked the laptop. I just wrote all this on it.

Attached is the output of lspci -nnk > lat6410.txt command.

Hi all...

Before I recommend this, do others feel that installing the Nvidia proprietary driver would resolve this issue?

Regards...

YES!!! Thanks ardvark71 for the tip to try nVidia drivers and all of you for helping me troubleshoot this.

Went ahead and installed the nVidia proprietary drivers and voila! it fixed the docking station issue.

You're welcome, I'm glad it helped you out! :)

Regards...