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Install and usage
Here you will find instructions in many ways to install, test and use Bumblebee.
The best an recommended way to install Bumblebee is through your distribution repositories. If not such packages exist, then you can still install Bumblebee manually from source.
AUR Package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=52210
ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bumblebee
Chakra Wiki: http://www.chakra-linux.org/wiki/index.php/Bumblebee
Debian Wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee
PPA: https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee/+archive/stable
Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee
Fedora Wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee
Overlay: http://gpo.zugaina.org/Overlays/mva (use layman -a mva to add)
Slackware Docs: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:nvidia_optimus
Hardware Support Forum: https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=39948
Here are some instructions on how to build the Bumblebee daemon (bumblebeed
) and client (optirun
). Whenever you see a command preceded by #
means it must be run as root (i.e. with sudo
).
- the source tarball from https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/downloads
- a C compiler
- pkg-config
- glib-2.0 and development headers
- libX11 and development headers
- libbsd and development headers
- help2man (optional, but recommended)
If you're building from git, you'll also need:
- autotools (2.68+ recommended)
- VirtualGL software (www.virtualgl.org)
- bbswitch (optional but recommended for Power Management)
- drivers. nouveau is an opensource choice. If you want to use the proprietary NVIDIA driver, you have to install it in a way such that its library files won't conflict with the Mesa libraries (notably libGL.so).
After downloading the source tarball, extract and configure it:
$ tar xf bumblebee-VERSION.tar.gz
$ cd bumblebee-VERSION
$ ./configure
If you have retrieved the code from the git repository, you need to run autoreconf -fi
prior to running ./configure
.
To set your default driver to nvidia
you need to pass some configuration flags to ./configure
step:
$ ./configure CONF_DRIVER=nvidia CONF_DRIVER_MODULE_NVIDIA=nvidia-current \
CONF_LDPATH_NVIDIA=/usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current \
CONF_MODPATH_NVIDIA=/usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules
Note: Those settings are intended for Ubuntu users, your paths may differ. (See the Warning under Using Nvidia header in Supported Drivers and Configuration for more information)
Note: the default installation path is /usr/local
, configuration files
will be installed to /usr/local/etc/bumblebee
. To change this to /usr
and
/etc/bumblebee
, use:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
For more configuration options, run ./configure --help
for more information.
Once the configuration has completed, build the binaries:
$ make
To install it system-wide:
# make install
Then you must create group bumblebee
on your system and add yourself to it
# groupadd bumblebee
# usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER
Re-login to apply changes.
You're not ready to use Bumblebee yet, the daemon must be started first (see Usage below).
The daemon must be started before the client can be used.
Have a look at Configuration for configuring Bumblebee. Often, no further modifications are needed.
The daemon can be started manually with:
# bumblebeed --daemon
For more command line options, run bumblebeed --help
(or man bumblebeed
if you've installed manpages).
If you want to start Bumblebee automatically when the system starts,
you need to use an initscript. Some example initscripts have been
build in the scripts/
directory. Refer to your distributions
documentation for instructions on installing one.
To run a program you just run
$ optirun <program-name>
Run optirun --help
for options or run man optirun
if you've
installed manual pages.
The next command runs the glxspheres
program on the discrete
video card:
$ optirun glxspheres