Bumblebee

Description

From Bumblebee's FAQ: Bumblebee is a effort to make Nvidia Optimus enabled laptops work in GNU/Linux systems. Such feature involves two graphics cards with two different power consumption profiles plugged in a layered way sharing a single framebuffer.

NOTE This guide explains how to get Nvidia Optimus working with the open source nouveau driver. Fedora does not support the proprietary Nvidia drivers. For information on how to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers with Bumblebee in Fedora 16 Click Here.

Install Dependencies

su -c "yum install -y libbsd-devel libbsd glibc-devel libX11-devel help2man autoconf git tar glib2 glib2-devel kernel-devel kernel-headers automake gcc"

You also need to install VirtualGL. Download the latest version for your arch at the VirtualGL download page

Install Bumblebee

Download the latest source from github.

git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee.git
cd Bumblebee

Create the install files.

autoreconf -fi
./configure --prefix=/opt/bumblebee
make

Install it:

su -c "make install"

You will also need to create relevant users and groups:

su -
groupadd bumblebee
usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER

You can get help by running --help on either binaries.

Enable bumblebee in systemd

If you want bumblebeed to start up on system boot, enable it in systemd:

su -
cp scripts/systemd/bumblebeed.service /lib/systemd/system/
systemctl enable bumblebeed.service

Install bbswitch

bbswitch is the kernel module responsible for turning on and off your nvidia card

Download the latest source from github.

git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch.git

without dkms

cd bbswitch

Create the install files and load in to the kernel.

make
su -c "make load"

This obviously needs to be loaded into the kernel every time and rebuilt manually with every kernel update. If you don't want to do that, use the #with dkms section below instead

with dkms

Install dkms

su -c "yum install dkms"

Install bbswitch

cd bbswitch/
su -c "make -f ./Makefile.dkms"

Usage

Now to run bumblebee:

su -c "systemctl start bumblebeed.service"

Run a command using the nvidia graphics card:

/opt/bumblebee/bin/optirun -- <command>