Bumblebee Project

Bumblebee aims to provide support for NVIDIA Optimus laptops for GNU/Linux distributions. Using Bumblebee, you can use your NVIDIA card for rendering graphics which will be displayed using the Intel card.

Installation

As Bumblebee is not available in a Ubuntu supported repository, Bumblebee 3.2 is supported by the Bumblebee Project community from Ubuntu version 12.04 up to 13.04.

Basic Setup

You need to open your terminal and enter the commands below.

If on 12.04.3, replace linux-headers-generic with linux-headers-generic-lts-raring.

1. (not needed for 13.10 Saucy and newer) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

2. Enable the Universe and Multiverse repositories (for bumblebee and nvidia packages respectively).

3. sudo apt-get update

4. Install Bumblebee using the default proprietary nvidia driver:

   sudo apt-get install bumblebee virtualgl linux-headers-generic

5. Reboot

Advanced Setups

For advanced users, if you do not want to use the proprietary nvidia driver or 32-bit libraries (for example, if you are only interested in power savings), you can do your custom installation.

Minimal setup : sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends bumblebee

Depending on your needs, add to this line:

• bumblebee-nvidia: proprietary nvidia driver support (if installed, become default over nouveau)

• virtualgl: VirtualGL as backend

• virtualgl-libs-ia32: 32bit support for VirtualGL on 64bit system, necessary to run 32bit app through optirun

• primus: primus/primusrun as backend (virtualgl Stays default, you need to run optirun -b primus <app>)

• primus-libs-ia32: 32bit support for primus/primurun on 64bit system, necessary to run 32bit app through optirun

Usage

To run your application with the discrete NVIDIA card run in the terminal:

• $ optirun [options] <application> [application-parameters]

Example:

• $ optirun firefox

For a list of options for optirun run:

• $ optirun --help

Normally you do not use optirun for your window manager, installations or other non graphic heavy demanding programs. The optirun command is mainly used for graphic demanding programs or for games.

Power Management

A primary goal of this project is to not only enable use of the discrete GPU for rendering, but also to enable smart power management of the dGPU when it's not in use. We're using either bbswitch (a module) or vga_switcheroo (kernel module, experimental) to do this in Bumblebee.

Since Bumblebee 3.0, this feature is enabled by default, using bbswitch. This allow automatic power management, without any configuration needs.

If Power Management doesn't work on your laptop, please go to this Power Management (PM) page and help to improve Bumblebee.

IRC

Please join #bumblebee channel on Freenode if you wish to help testing and creating the installer.

Reporting bugs/problems

First of all: If you have any problem, please read this article: http://wiki.Bumblebee-Project.org/Troubleshooting

If your issue is not solved, you can join the #bumblebee IRC channel to ask for help (recommended). See also http://wiki.Bumblebee-Project.org/Reporting-Issues

If you're asked to create a bugreport, run the next command in a terminal: sudo bumblebee-bugreport

Uninstall

If you're unsatisfied with Bumblebee, you can remove it via:

1. sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

2. sudo ppa-purge ppa:bumblebee/stable

If you want to keep some programs from the bumblebee repository, you can also suffice by removing Bumblebee only (including its dependencies):

1. sudo apt-get purge bumblebee

2. sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

Social Media

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CUDA

There is sometimes confusion about CUDA. You don't need Bumblebee to run CUDA. Follow the How-to to get CUDA working under Ubuntu.

There is however a new feature (--no-xorg option for optirun) in Bumblebee 3.2, which makes it possible to run CUDA / OpenCL applications that does not need the graphics rendering capabilities.

CategoryHardware