Bumblebee

Description

Bumblebee is a tool for managing discrete graphics cards on laptops. There has been several attempts in the past but the latest project is working on a more complete solution. It comes in a few parts this page currently only deals with the bbswitch tool which allows the discrete card to be disabled and save battery life.

This is not a complete guide, this only provides an outline of what needs to be done in order to have Nvidia optimus working with nouveau. Fedora does not support NVidia blob, for information on how to use the nvidia blob with Bumblebee in Fedora 16 Click Here.

Requirements

• help2man
• libX11-devel
• glibc-devel
• libbsd-devel
• automake
• more?

Install Dependancies

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

Install VirtualGL | Click Here and select VirtualGL 2.3 - your arch

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=/usr
make

Install it:

sudo make install

You will also need to create relevant users and groups:

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

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

Install bbswitch

Download the latest source from github.

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

Create the install files and load in to the kernel.

make
sudo make load

This obviously needs to be loaded in to the kernel every time. There is a dkms make file in the devlop branch.

Usage

Now to run bumblebee:

sudo bumblebeed --daemon
optirun -- <application>