Lenovo ThinkPad T400 and docking station

thinkpad dock lenovo

10,617

I have a similar experience with T400 and dock station (ThinkPad Port Advanced Mini Dock). I'm using Fedora 14 and the Intel graphics (Radeon switched off in BIOS, as both the proprietary and open the driver has issues in dual screen mode).

When I undock with the laptop running, usually the laptop is still usable. The later dock-in operation is not 100% successful, e.g. the usb mouse connected to the docking station is no more working till the next re-boot.

To be honest, I'd be happy if I could at least suspend to disk - undock - resume - suspend to disk - dock in - resume, but this cycle has just about 30-50% success - which is a real pain. So result is that unplugging few more cables is much faster then waiting for re-boot and opening all the docs closed before the shutdown :-(

Concerning the hot undock-dock, I have tried the howto on http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Docking_Solutions

The shell script works well, after some customization, but udev rule

/etc/udev/rules.d/81-thinkpad-dock.rules
KERNEL=="dock.0", ACTION=="change", RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/thinkpad-dock.sh"

does not trigger it.

10,617

hari

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

hari over 1 year

Developer in me woke up this morning and asked me to fix this before Christmas. (As his Christmas gift).

So, if I power on the laptop after docking it, everything works fine. But if I am working on it standalone and then try to dock it, I cannot get the display. Same way, if I undock it while working, I loose the display.

Basically, I need to reboot for any docking/undocking dance to work.

Questions: 1) What kind of information should I be looking for to understand the problem? 2) Where to find that information.

After this, I can go and try to figure out what is going wrong.
- Admin over 13 years
  
  No takers? Marry X'mas.
- Admin over 13 years
  
  Santa is not happy this year - I guess. Thanks anyways.
- Admin over 13 years
  
  Sorry - not an answer only a seconding. As a matter of fact, suspend and resume on the t400 seems broken more often than working correctly
- Admin almost 13 years
  
  The problem is not specific to T400. I have a Dell Inspiron D830 with a D-Port and facing the same issue. Even the keyboard/mouse is sometimes lost in addition to the display when hot (un)docking. I guess this has something to do with X server configuration not being refreshed.
codeape over 11 years

On my T520, the VGA output on the docking station is connected to the integrated graphics.