Just posting this in case anyone else had the same problem and finds their way here. I ran an aptitude update this morning and restarted my system (Thinkpad W520, Ubuntu 14.04). I was astonished when no GUI Login appeared (in the "Discrete" graphics BIOS Mode). After doing a bit of digging, I found that bumblebee had blacklisted the nvidia kernel module in /etc/modprobe.d/bumblebee.conf . I don't know why this started to happen, but my solution was to uninstall bumblebee:
$ sudo aptitude purge bumblebee
You may also have to reinstall the nvidia drivers:
$ sudo aptitude reinstall nvidia-___
where the `___` is the version number.
Anyways, now things work in "Discrete" graphics BIOS Mode. Haven't investigated "NVIDIA-Optimus" mode yet.
Oooh. Good to know. I'm currently in 15.04 on a W520, with primus installed and (shockingly) working. (And using some absurd new-version driver.)
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of tricks here.
I used: http://rajat-osgyan.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/how-to-install-bumblebee-on-ubuntu.html (beware his typos though. Commands should be inspected, not simply copy-pastaed.)
The driver name will be annoying.
The bit that was tedious for me was getting the bumblebee.conf set up right:
KernelDriver=nvidia-346
PMMethod=auto
# colon-separated path to the nvidia libraries
LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-346:/usr/lib32/nvidia-346
# comma-separated path of the directory containing nvidia_drv.so and the
# default Xorg modules path
XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-346/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules
is what I ended up with in the annoying section.
And the final thing that made it click (and be useful) is to ignore primusrun, but used the prime indicator http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/prime-indicator-lets-you-quickly-switch.html that literally allows me to swap intel/nvidia states.
Anyways, thanks for the heads up. Which nvidia drivers are you using?