Wednesday, October 15, 2014

How I got Plugable Dock working with Fedora 20 and Lenovo W520 laptop

I purchased a Plugable UD-160-A USB 2.0 Universal Docking Station a couple of years ago.  I use this with my Lenovo W520 laptop to avoid having to connect a keyboard, mouse, ethernet and external set of speakers.

This configuration worked fine when I ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 on my Lenovo W520.  I since switched to Fedora 20 on both my W520 and my W510 laptops.  I heard that Fedora 20 worked better with Plugable but that was not my case. 

My keyboard worked when I booted my laptop (I must use LUKs encrpytion so I must enter a password at each boot) but when I got my login screen (lightdm), the keyboard and mouse were not working and I tried searching and gave up on a solution until yesterday.  The lspci command showed my keyboard, mouse, ethernet adapter and audio sound device built-in into the Plugable device.

I found this post in on the Plugable website that contained a simple udev rule that needed to be commented out and the computer rebooted.  I applied the change and my keyboard, mouse and ethernet work.  I am assuming the speaker also works.

The solution was to to edit /lib/udev/rules.d/71-seat.rules as root user and comment the following line (second line actually):

# 'Plugable' USB hub, sound, network, graphics adapter
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="2230", ATTR{idProduct}=="000[13]", ENV{ID_AUTOSEAT}="1"

I am so happy that I don't have to plug so 6 cables into my Lenovo W520 laptop anymore when I am at home.