BumbleBee drivers for Nvidia Cards reached to Version 3.1 - Install in Ubuntu or Linux Mint

Bumblebee is a (unofficial) tool that brings Nvidia Optimus GPU switching to Linux. Nvidia Optimus is a technology used to increase battery life by switching the dedicated GPU (Nvidia) off when it's not needed; when the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip (Intel) is used. Bumblebee also supports legacy Nvidia hybrid graphics.

Changes in Bumblebee 3.1:

support for Primus as an alternative to VirtualGL as optirun backend. This is configurable through a new "Bridge" option in bumblebee.conf that by default is set to "auto" - it selects VirtualGL if installed and if not, it uses Primus. In Bumblebee 4.0, Primus may be used as the default option;
optirun has gained an option for on-the-fly back-end choice: --bridge;
use of non-blocking sockets, replacing former 3.0.1 hotfix for socket polling;
added an udev rule to fix nvidia card randomly turning on;
fix for Kepler generation cards was added in xorg.conf.nvidia;
fix for dual nvidia hybrid systems;
fixed nouveau not working under X.org 1.13+;
fixed available drivers detection by supporting module aliases;
other fixes.

Installation of BumbleBee drivers in Ubuntu or Linux Mint, Enter following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

Then, if you want an application or game to use the Nvidia graphics card, launch it with "optirun", e.g.: "optirun steam".

To use the new Primus backend, you'll also have to install Primus:

sudo apt-get install primus

64bit: you also need to install "primus-libs-ia32:i386" (note that if you're using the Primus PPA, the package you need to install is "primus-lib:i386"):

sudo apt-get install primus-libs-ia32:i386

Then, change the "Bridge" option in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf to "primus". You can also directly call Primus from optirun via command line, like this:

optirun -b primus APP

Where "APP" is the application you want to launch.

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bumblebee linux nvidia nvidia bumblebee ubuntu

Umair

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