Bumblebee
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
Bumblebee 3.0 is supported up to Ubuntu version 12.10.
You need to open your terminal and enter the commands below.
If on 12.04.2, do not add the supplementary PPA for updated nvidia drivers, and replace linux-headers-generic with linux-headers-generic-lts-quantal.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
- For more up-to-date nvidia drivers, you need to add another PPA. As of 12.04, this is still necessary for Nvidia GT 6xxM cards. It may be optional for the GT 4xxM and GT 5xxM series on 12.04. When in doubt, just install it. The command is:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
- Install Bumblebee using the proprietary nvidia driver:
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic
- Reboot or re-login
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), install bumblebee with:
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends bumblebee linux-headers-generic
linux-headers-generic is necessary since bbswitch (the power saving module) is a kernel module.
Upgrading
If you already got Bumblebee installed on your system, upgrade to Bumblebee 3.0.
Please, follow the instructions on this wiki: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/Upgrading-on-Ubuntu
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:
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
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):
sudo apt-get purge bumblebee
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove
Social Media
Follow us on: Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
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.