I installed 12.04 using wubi on an Acer notebook.

With the laptop lid closed my main external monitor works fine via HDMI; the second monitor shows only a bright green color.

After some googling I installed the DisplayLink drivers but this caused no changes. Next I created a file as described here...after a reboot I now have a terminal in the HDMI screen and still a bright green screen on the DisplayLink monitor.

I've used Ubuntu on and off many times over the years and I'm surprised to find that this doesn't work out of the box. I read somewhere that Fedora 17 handles DisplayLink well - I don't mind switching distros (or going back to Windows) if necessary but I'd sure like to think there's a not-too-difficult fix for this in Ubuntu. Thanks.