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.
Install Dependencies
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 [1]
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:
sudo make install
You will also need to create relevant users and groups:
sudo groupadd bumblebee sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER
You can get help by running --help on either binaries.
Enable bumblebee in systemd
sudo cp scripts/systemd/bumblebeed.service /lib/systemd/system/ sudo systemctl enable bumblebeed.service
Install bbswitch - without dkms
Download the latest source from github.
git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch.git cd bbswitch
Create the install files and load in to the kernel.
make sudo make load
This obviously needs to be loaded into the kernel every time and rebuilt manually with every kernel update. If you don't want to do that, use the 'Install bbswitch - with dkms' section below instead
Install bbswitch - with dkms
sudo yum install dkms git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bbswitch.git BBSWITCHVERSION=$(grep MODULE_VERSION bbswitch.c|awk -F\" '{print $2}') sudo mv bbswitch /usr/src/bbswitch-$BBSWITCHVERSION sudo dkms add -m bbswitch -v $BBSWITCHVERSION sudo dkms build -m bbswitch -v $BBSWITCHVERSION sudo dkms install -m bbswitch -v $BBSWITCHVERSION
Usage
Now to run bumblebee:
sudo systemctl start bumblebeed.service /opt/bumblebee/bin/optirun -- <application>