I use an Asus laptop with Optimus. The VGA output is wired to the Intel card, while the HDMI output is wired to the Nvidia card.
I'm not using PRIME or nouveau, but prefer a bumblebee setup (the only real use of my Nvidia card is to run games on steam, really). PRIME gave really weird bugs with regards to mouse cursor screen-lock etc, and nouveau makes my nvidia's 'performance' on par with that of my Intel card, which defeats the purpose.
On bumblebee, I can get the external HDMI monitor working by using intel-virtual-output
. the monitor then appears without issue in xrandr
and can be used as a clone/extended screen using the normal xrandr
tools. However this requires that I comment out the "UseDisplayDevice"
option in /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia
The problem with doing that is that when I don't have a monitor connected to HDMI (whenever I'm away from the office), primusrun will complain that no monitor is connected, and I have to have the following uncommented line
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "none"
in the device section of /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia
This setup is the result of tweaking and googling for a while, and the only 'problem' with it is the repeated need to edit the nvidia xorg.conf depending on whether I have a monitor or not. Is there any way to get around that?
Best Answer
I had a similar problem on my Optimus Laptop -- I have an HDMI monitor working via
intel-virtual-output
, but when it was disconnected,optirun
failed.What seems to work for me is the following
/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia
(I use the proprietary Nvidia driver):The important bit is the line
After adding it, both single and multi-monitor configurations started working automatically, though I ran into problems where
gdm.service
would hang when started at the same time asbumblebeed.service
—I'm not sure if this is related, but it probably is.