Supported drivers

Bumblebee supports both Nvidia proprietary driver and Nouveau.

Using Nouveau

You must be sure your card is supported by looking at Nouveau's feature matrix, the other way around is to test it. Then you must have a fairly recent kernel (>=3.1) for such features to work. In most cases the newer the kernel, the more a better features added since Nouveau developers are moving fast on 3D support for Nvidia cards. ####Packages needed You will need the experimental Gallium3D libraries shipped in:

-xf86-video-nouveau -nouveau-dri -libgl

Look for the relevant packages in your distro (the package names may differ) and you are all set. Then make sure the following line is in your configuration file of the Bumblebee Xorg server:

Section "Device"
    ...
    Driver "nouveau"
    ...
EndSection

It should come by default in the stock configuration of Bumblebee.

Using Nvidia

You must install the Nvidia binaries in a way that won't break Mesa's LibGL, it's needed for 3D acceleration on the intel card. This means that on most distros you will need a Bumblebee specific package for it to run, the stock packages on most cases will break LibGL.

Then make sure the following line is in your configuration file of the Bumblebee Xorg server:

Section "Device"
    ...
    Driver "nvidia"
    BusID "PCI:X:X:X"
    ...
EndSection

It should come by default in the stock configuration of Bumblebee. The BusID option should be matched with your graphics card Bus ID. You can find it by running:

lspci -v -d 10de:

You may want to use a newer driver than the one in your distro repo. If on Ubuntu, you may get the latest stable release from here : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates