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I'd like to start using my docking station again; however, it still doesn't work as it should, see the following bug descriptions (with special focus on Thinkpad X41 & the X4 Dock). Given that it still doesn't work (effective April 2012), my hope is fading that it will start working all of a sudden with Precise Pangolin at the end of the month. This issue is VERY important to me and I would be MOST grateful to anyone being able to sieve through the following links (some of which are actually quite recent) and translate their meaning into reliable and concrete simple (?) steps. I've read briefly about hal and udev, and can imagine that they are somewhat related to this, see links below. I don't want to fire at random. I don't want to tinker around with bash scripts if avoidable...

Problem description (more or less ;-)

Pressing the undock button on a "ThinkPad X4 Dock" with a ThinkPad X40 does not cause any udev events. And the lights on the dock never change to indicate it is safe to undock.

and

IBM Thinkpad X41 & docking station >> no joy :-( ... when pressing the blue undock button on the docking station: - The screen goes blank (with backlight remaining on), - with some SSD/HDD activity; - ctrl alt del causes a shut down after ... seconds, indicating that the system itself hasn't "crashed" but is still (somewhat ?) responsive.

and

With recent distributions, docking and undocking should function out of the box. You can monitor this by running # udevadm monitor and when you dock or press the undock button you should see a flurry of events. There are some issues though: No event on undock. - In some cases you may not get any events on undock. This is due to the ACPI dock drivers only registering the first logical Dock port they encounter and in some rare cases there may be more then one, such as on a ThinkPad X40 with ThinkPad X4 Dock. Patches are available, and are merged in 2.6.34.

Now, if patches are available and merged into 2.6.34 - why isn't (un)docking simply working / fully supported in the latest version of Natty (which to my humble understanding has surpassed kernel version 2.6.34 a while ago)?

More relevant links:

ThinkPad X41 Docking Station issues

and

[HOWTO] Run scripts for laptop lid open/close and dock/undock events

and finally

Symptoms corrected by the latest BIOS Update - ThinkPad X41 - (Fix) USB devices connected to UltraBase X4 or ThinkPad X4 Dock may not be recognized in Boot Menu by pressing F12 during POST.

Thanks!!

nutty about natty
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This is preliminary, but pending further findings I think this issue has been resolved by means of normal updates: it seems to be working just fine now (using the blue undock button on the docking station when undocking; and cycling through fn f7 if using an external monitor), hot-warm-lukewarm docking all seems to be handled well now.

Thanks, UBUNTU !

UPDATE: even after (accidentally) undocking (while a lot of stuff was running) without pressing the blue undock button on the docking station the system remained stable / responsive / "there" / reliable / etc (only a quick "toggle" of fn f7 needed to get the display(s) back in order). So, finally, it just works !! yeah :D

nutty about natty
  • 6,788