this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I was actually reading about maybe using wine? I know nothing about wine other than it allows for windows packages to be downloaded I think... Hmmm so maybe that could work
Wine may unfortunately not work for this, as trying to install drivers and firmware through Wine isn't really a thing AFAIK - because it doesn't have the same level of hardware access. Not to mention, even if you did get drivers installed, it would probably only work within applications that are also installed into that Wine prefix (some people do this for say, peripherals like mice & keyboard that have accompanying software such as iCue for specific games).
Out of curiosity, have you tried the dock even without installing these components? I'm not super familiar with Dell's docks, but I know that others tend to "just work" due to already having drivers baked into the kernel.
For the firmware side of things, I've heard there are various projects that can create a Windows Live USB for you, which you could use to run the firmware installer theoretically.
Very interesting. I haven't even tried hooking up the docking station... Just the part in the user guide that states certain drivers or firmware must be installed first kinda deterred me. Maybe I will try hooking it up and seeing what happens. Who knows, maybe the dock will help install those drivers automatically
Yeah worst come to worse, it just "doesn't work" - but its not like it would be damaged just because drivers/firmware aren't installed. I would bet most people don't even install the drivers right away in Windows either, they just plug it in and see if it works - and then if it doesn't work they may do some further digging to why (leading them to the drivers/firmware that is potentially needed).
I'm assuming this dock just has ports for video output, USB, etc on it? I'd expect most ports to work, with the only potential one not working out-of-the-box being video depending on how Dell implements it. My only experience with docking stations is an old Star...something dock, and that worked in Linux with no issue, I think at the time I had to install a DisplayLink driver since that was the video output tech that it used to send video out through USB (and even then, older models already had a built-in kernel driver, I just had a much newer one). These days with the prevalence of things like Thunderbolt/USB-C I wouldn't be surprised if everything works out of box just fine.
I did do some quick research on dell docking stations in general, the only one that needed any manual intervention was their TB16 docking station. Apparently that one does require some firmware to be installed for a few components of the laptop that is required. Did you ever run Windows on this laptop? If so (or if the laptop itself is just relatively new), that firmware should've already been installed long ago via Windows Update as this information was from about 5 years ago.
Either way, I'd say just try it and see if it works - if it does, then you'll be able to skip the hassle of trying to get Windows installed (either via a live environment, or via a dual boot)!
So yea I just hooked up the dock and in gnome firmware it appears that the proper drivers for the dock are installed, but theres like no gui or anything to configure the thing? is it supposed to be that way? how do people make any changes or configurations to their docks? I see no way on my system to do so
Out of curiosity, what options were you looking to configure? Since I'm not familiar with these docking stations, I wasn't even aware they had configuration options haha.
I have no idea lol I just figured there would be some sort of app or gui for it so you can tweak settings or what not. not gonna lie but the dell documentation for this dock is terrible. for instance, if it's always plugged into your laptop, the battery will always be at 100%; isn't that terrible for your battery?
As far as I had last heard, most laptop (and phones) batteries have charging circuits that are designed to let the battery discharge a bit to prevent the health from being degraded quickly - not all of them actively report that process though and tells the OS it's at 100%, so that the user doesn't wonder why their charge is dropping while it's plugged in.
I'm not sure if that is all the same case, as the only laptop that I've had for a while is a really old MacBook Pro that runs Fedora, but I don't use it super often because I prefer my desktop - so I don't keep up with a lot of laptop-oriented stuff unfortunately.
I changed the charging option in bios to "primarily use AC" or something along those lines, so hoping that helps prevent possible problems