Getting gnome-shell working on nvidia optimus notebook

Question

what i need is to enable the lamest hardware acceleration to get gnome-shell or unity 3d working.

• i know about bumblebee/ironhide/bumblebee-project. but i didn't understand how to use it directly with x11 server to enable the use of those advanced environment.
• i don't care about what card will give me gnome-shell/unity3d working. i wonder if there is a way to use only intel (but accellerated!)
• i really don't care about power save

i'm tired to be reverted to gnome-session-fallback or unity 2d.

please tell me if there is a way or if i will be stuck with gnome 2.* until i'll buy another laptop.

Solution 1

Yeah! I figured out how to get the hardware acceleration of the Intel graphic hd 3000 to enable unity 3d and gnome-shell.

It seems that ubuntu tries to install drivers for both intel hd 3000 and nvidia-optimus card. result? a mess. X11 server can't decide what driver to use and revert to VESA.

So the solution is really simple:

apt-get remove --purge nvidia-current nvidia-common nvidia-settings xserver-xorg-video-nv

plus remove all other display driver xserver-xorg-video-* except xserver-xorg-video-intel. reboot the computer and tadan! at least you can enjoy a little acceleration!

Solution 2

dude.. this is wrong.. just reinstall the drivers of intel:

$ sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-intel

$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

the problem is that when u remove the nvidia drivers.. the files in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/ are removed... but if you reinstall the intel driver it will copy the files back again and everything will be fine! :)

(https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee i am now using bumblebee for using the nvidia card whenever i want, and it works very fine! :D )

if you want to try again to install bumblebee, first we have to remove any old crap you may still have installed:

$ sudo apt-get --purge remove ironhide bumblebee

(check out this issue: I can't uninstall Ironhide, or install any other packages)

after successfully removing this packages we have to make sure nouveau driver is blacklisted to do that:

we add the text:

blacklist nouveau

to the file

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

to open the file do

$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

now we edit the file:

/etc/default/grub

We look for the line that says: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and we change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash rdblacklist=nouveau"

OK! now we have no nouveau anymore :D epic win!! now we have to install the nvidia proprietary drivers

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

(I'm not 100% sure about it, because i installed it using the additional drivers tool!! )

ok, now we have everything set up for installing bumblebee.

first we add the ppa of bumblebee

$ sudo ppa-purge ppa:mj-casalogic/bumblebee

then

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install bumblebee

after this... we can check if everything is setup by running:

$ glxgears 

this will use the intel HD card... but if you add optirun before the command it will use the nvidia card

$ optirun glxgears

good luck!