The Elgato teleprompter is one of my favorites of all time. The way the camera slides into a shell, the built-in screen that extends your computer, it's basically a masterpiece.

But with all hardware, where is the linux support? Fortunately it uses a "standard" called DisplayPort over USB-C, but this requires special drivers in Linux. These drivers exist, but can be a pain to get working, for example when you run a newer Kernel than they officially support.

This happened to me. I want to run Kubuntu (same as Ubuntu) 24.10 which uses Kernel 6.11. The PPA doesn't work, the installer doesn't work, everything is just out of date. I waited months for them to fix it, and when that failed, I turned to the community. Fortunately someone has found the solution.

The good news is that evdi is open source and the latest version supports the latest kernels, but getting it to work with the drivers they give you kind of sucks, but here's the process that works (thanks totimmey09 on reddit):

  1. Download the latest standalone driver.
  2. cd ~/Downloads or wherever you want to interact with these files
  3. Unzip it unzip -x Display*.zip
  4. Fix the permissions on the .run file chmod a+x displaylink*.run
  5. Remove any older versions sudo ./displaylink*.run --uninstall
  6. Unpack the installer so we can modify it ./displaylink*.run --noexec --keep
  7. Remove the outdated evdi with rm displaylink*/evdi.tar.gz
  8. Download the latest cd displaylink*; curl -L https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi/archive/refs/heads/devel.tar.gz -o evdi.tar.gz;cd ..
  9. Edit the tar command from if ! tar xf “$TARGZ” -C “$EVDI”; then to if ! tar xf “$TARGZ” -C “$EVDI --strip-components=1; then (basically just add --strip-components)
  10. Run the installer with sudo displaylink*/displaylink-installer.sh
  11. Reboot and you should be good to go!

This has been a lifesafer, because it lets me use the hardware I want with the software I want.