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 gtk2-devel"
You also need to install VirtualGL. Download the latest version for your arch at the VirtualGL download page
Note: VirtualGL added Fedora 18 repository.You can install via yum with that command If you use Fedora 18;
yum install VirtualGL
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>