My ASUS laptop has 2 graphics cards, one Nvidia and the other Intel. Ubuntu uses the Intel one by default, but that leads to poor performance for gaming. So I need to install the Bumblebee drivers.
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
- sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia bbswitch-dkms
- Reboot or re-login
Swat PPA has the latest Nvidia drivers.
Except that I log back in and ‘optirun glxspheres’ returns:
[ 118.398232] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: Could not load GPU driver [ 118.398323] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.
Luckily this can be fixed by editing /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf. Look for the line that says ‘Driver=’ and add ‘nvidia’ at the end. Then reboot, and test with ‘optirun glxspheres’. The graphics card light should switch from blue to white, and the output should look something like the following:
Polygons in scene: 62464 Visual ID of window: 0x21 Context is Direct OpenGL Renderer: GeForce GT 540M/PCIe/SSE2 111.175734 frames/sec - 124.072120 Mpixels/sec 112.450230 frames/sec - 125.494456 Mpixels/sec 125.164298 frames/sec - 139.683357 Mpixels/sec
The fix comes from here.
If its still not working try reinstalling using the advice at http://www.ivegotavirus.com/how-to-fix-bumblebee-on-ubuntu-12-10/
Hopefully this is a bit cleaner in 13.04.
