Ubuntu – Ubuntu 14.04 nvidia-prime “is it supported? no”

nvidianvidia-optimusxorg

I have an Optimus laptop, a Dell XPS 15 L502, which I've had for a few years and have tried various things on (bumblebee, nvidia-prime, linux kernel optimus support).

The graphics card is an NVIDIA GT 540M.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 a few days ago and wanted to try nvidia-prime again (it wasn't working so great for me on 13.10), but nvidia-settings only tells me that it is not supported.

Software and Updates recognises the Nvidia card and drivers.
Nvidia Settings currently gives me this:

** Message: PRIME: No offloading required. Abort
** Message: PRIME: is it supported? no

I've tried to purge and reinstall nvidia drivers a dozen times, I've tried with and without xorg.conf files, but still always the same thing.

I've followed all the guides I could find on Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, and various other places.

EDIT: I was having problem with booting into "low-graphics mode", but that was due to a bad lightdm configuration that broke when I upgraded. I also had some segmentation fault issues with nvidia-settings installing the wrong version of itself (this was fixed by reinstalling just nvidia-settings).

EDIT: Have also found this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-prime/+bug/1283439

Best Answer

I have the same portable, I was using bumblebee before. But since 14.04 it was not working anymore and so now I switched to nvidia-prime. This is what I did:

Steps

Install Nouveau driver through "Software & updates"

Remove bumblebee or other installed nvidia drivers:

sudo apt-get purge bumblebee*
sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*

An then reboot
Install nvidia 331-updates driver through "Software & updates" (should also install nvidia-settings and nvidia-prime)
Then reboot

Now run again nvidia-settings. This did it for me, more info here.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to get switchable graphics to work on the Samsung RF711 With Intel HD & GeForce 540M Graphics cards on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

You can try the nvidia-prime package, to have a better support of the Nvidia Optimus Technology.

The first step is to clean-up a little bit your system with :

sudo apt-get purge bumblebee* primus libvdpau-va-gl1

And we install the nvidia driver and nvidia-prime :

sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 nvidia-prime mesa-utils

If you want the grapical acceleration for HD videos, you can install :

sudo apt-get install vdpau-va-driver

Then reboot your system. And go to 'nvidia-settings' to check under the nvidia-prime section if you can switch card.

Nvidia-Prime Settings. Source : webupd8.org

You can also add an applet for unity to simply switch between cards : prime-indicator

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install prime-indicator
sudo reboot

More info about the prime-indicator.

Ubuntu – How am I supposed to use nvidia-prime

You need to have both Nvidia proprietary drivers and nvidia-prime to get it working. This can be done by running

sudo apt-get install nvidia-346 nvidia-prime

for Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.04.

Then you will have Nvidia X Server Settings in Dash. And there you can find PRIME profiles.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to get switchable graphics to work on the Samsung RF711 With Intel HD & GeForce 540M Graphics cards on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Ubuntu – How am I supposed to use nvidia-prime

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