Install Bumblebee on Linux Mint 17

I’ve an Asus N76VB with a NVIDIA GeForce 740M graphics card. Normally I always have trouble getting NVIDIA Optimus to work, but when I just installed Linux Mint 17 I had everything fully working in less than 5 minutes.

Because I’m sure there are enough people who didn’t get it working in less than 5 minutes I decided to write this brief tutorial.

Please leave a comment if you’ve any questions!

Installing Bumblebee

1. Open a terminal
2. Install Bumblebee and the NVIDIA driver:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia bbswitch-dkms primus nvidia-331
   

3. Now we’ve to make a few minor changes to Bumblebee’s configuration:

   sudo gedit /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
   

   • Edit (do not remove or add any lines) the lines so they match the lines below:

     Driver=nvidia
     [driver-nvidia]
     KernelDriver=nvidia-331
     LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-331:/usr/lib32/nvidia-331
     XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-331/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules
     

   • Save the file
   • Restart your computer
   • Test if it’s working (you should get a high FPS):

     vblank_mode=0 glxgears