Supposedly there is a way to configure the NVidia drivers to force use of the NVidia chip always. Yes yes, that drains batteries more quickly. "I do not care."
System76 knows the technique. I sent them an inquiry seeing that they offer a laptop with the NVidia Geforce GTX 970M or 980M chips. Their reply was they configure it without the need of Optimus + bumblebee to always use the NVidia chip. That tells me it is possible... "How, please?" -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nvidia-graphics-drivers-331-updates in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1280613 Title: Nvidia Optimus + bumblebee configuration not optimized by default Status in Bumblebee: New Status in nvidia-graphics-drivers-331-updates package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Hardware configuration is a ThinkPad T540p with GeForce GT 730M. I understand that this graphics chip as some new fangled "Nvidia Optimus" technology involved. I began testing with Xubuntu 13.10 x64, then re-imaged the system with the Alpha build of Xubuntu 14.04 x64 of 20140214. I have had to do extensive hand editing to the configuration of selecting both nvidia-graphics-drivers-331-updates and the bumblebee packages in order to at least see the Nvidia driver "active" in the Nvidia Settings applet. I have been updating the modprobe configuration: /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf commenting out the exclusions for the 331 version driver I have updated the bumblebee configuration: /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf according to the example found here: http://elementaryforum.org/forum/support-assistance/how-to_aa/3996-nvidia-optimus-drivers-and-tools-installation#post3997 To get the NVIDIA Settings to show the board finally... I found this command here: "Nvidia Optimus on Linux" \ "How to use Bumblebee." http://www.linux.org/threads/nvidia-optimus-on-linux.4415/ optirun -b none nvidia-settings -c :8 However starting an additional instance of the NVIDIA Settings applet via the Xubuntu menu system shows that instance not being able to detect the Nvidia drivers being loaded. So it seems that one must use the optirun command to start individual programs that the Nvidia drivers are requested to service the video for?! This makes absolutely no sense. Shortly I am seeking automatic configuration of the latest Nvidia binary drivers to be used 100% of the time. Even the old Envy Nvidia binary driver installer worked far more simply than dealing with this "Nvidia Optimus" technology. "Needs improvement." To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/the-bumblebee-project/+bug/1280613/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
