Friday, February 1, 2013

Nvidia Optimus support in Ubuntu


If you have a laptop with nVidia Optimus and you run Linux (in my case Ubuntu) it will drain your battery very fast (in my case 2-3 times faster than on Windows).

In order to counter this, I install Bumblebee on my laptop. This will allow you to use the discrete graphics card when you need it and turn it off when you don't.
Bumblebee 3.0 is supported up to Ubuntu version 12.10.


In order to install Bumblebee enter the following commands in a terminal:
  1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
  2. sudo apt-get update
  3. sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic
  4. Reboot
To run a program using the nVidia card run:
optirun firefox
If you have problems please check the references.

References:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee
http://bumblebee-project.org/
https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee

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