[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Nice article TommyC. I do not myself own a laptop with such dual graphics but I hope some of the site's audience do, and that they leave a comment.
I have one suggestion: in the beginning you explain the difference between “$” and “#” commands, but then afterwards most of the commands you show do not have any kind of prompt at all. This is confusing. You would do good to add an appropriate command prompt to every terminal command throughout the article.
Eric Hameleers 2012/10/01 13:47

Ah yeah, I had to go to class after I put that in. Will get to it later today. — TommyC 2012/10/01 15:56

Very useful article!!
I used it to setup the bumblebee system on my notebook with slackware64-current, but to build the nvidia-bumblebee package with the COMPAT32 option produce an only 32bit libvdpau_nvidia.so (in my case a link to libvdpau_nvidia.325.15). This produce a wrong ELF message error. Apart from this it works very fine.
Thank you
Matteo

As all updates I performed on the how-to were reverted… and a note then added to comment here… can you let me know which of them were wrong, misleading, etc or at least some reason for the reversion of all updates? Thanks :)
Nick Blizzard 2013/08/21 08:37

I've already discussed this with you over IRC when I made the revert, but to recap: I added more information and reorganized a lot of it to improve the quality of the article and decided to revert because it was easier to re-organize from the revert than changing from the previously made changes. Also, as previously shown, a lot of the points you made when you talked with me about it the second time were moot since I had addressed them in the article since the revert. — TommyC 2013/09/20 17:28
If a generic kernel is used and an initrd is needed, i found that bbswitch only can be loaded if we put there like a module like this: mkinitrd -c -k 3.11.8 -f ext4 -r /dev/sda1 -m usbhid:hid_generic:xhci-hcd:mbcache:bbswithc:nvidia:jbd2:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz . Also, i if nvidia driver is used also why not load it from initrd ? I put there too. Can this procedure be insert on this howto? — Francis 2013/11/21 21:21
That's odd. My system loads the bbswitch module after boot (I too am using the generic kernel so I also use an initrd). As far as I know, the initrd is only used for booting in order to mount the root filesystem. The other kernel modules should be loaded after booting (since the nvidia kernel and bbswitch modules aren't actually needed to boot the system). I've never added the bbswitch or nvidia kernel module to my initrd and here's the output of `lsmod | grep bbswitch“: bbswitch 5310 0. I'm not sure why your system needs the module to be loaded from the initrd. Did you compile a custom kernel and do some stuff with it? — TommyC 2013/11/24 18:35
It is the 3.11.8 version, using the .config from the generic source. I do not remeber if it was from the testing (3.12) or from the current (3.10.17) but in both, for new modules i choose the default option, nothing else more.— Francis 2013/11/25 23:21
I've tested this various times now with various kernel versions. Unfortunately I am not able to reproduce your problem. I wonder if anybody else is able to? Until various others can confirm that the bbswitch module *must* be in the initrd and doesn't load on boot, I'm not sure if I'd like to add that tidbit to the article.
What happens if you remove the bbswitch (and nvidia) module from the initrd, and then modprobe them in your system and restart the bumblebee daemon? — TommyC 2013/11/27 19:50
It is normal now, bbswitch can load by /etc/rc.local . This is strange, i did nothing… I will see if in more couple day something will happen. Sorry to bother with this.— Francis 2013/11/28 22:36

TommyC, jgeboski is no longer able to keep the repo updated for these packages as he isn't using slackware on that machine anymore and he asked me to take this over. When you get a chance, can you please point the page to my repo as it is now rather more up to date? Also, some packages have been removed / updated, etc. Most are setup in my readme on the github page. https://github.com/WhiteWolf1776/Bumblebee-SlackBuilds Thanks.

Yeah sure, I'll put your github link back. Not sure why you removed it previously, though. — TommyC 2014/03/07 22:55
Not sure I was clear then. The main repo you will then be pointing folks to is, and will continue to be, out of date as jgeboski has no way to continue to test these properly. He has asked that I take it over. You can chat with him on irc if you like. A link at the bottom of the page is just going to be confusing as most folks do not read the bottom of the page first. — whitewolf1776 2014/03/08 08:12
Nah I believe you. No need to repeat yourself. I'll be adding in your repo soon enough. — TommyC 2014/03/08 13:42

You may want to add a note about -current… the kernel updates out today break the nvidia driver. So far I haven't worked out a fix. Hopefully this is just a short lived issue — whitewolf1776 2014/05/09 19:10

I'm also hoping it'll be pretty short, but since future problems between software X and software Y that rely on each other for anything (not just nvidia/linux) could occur, I updated the note about mixing and matching nvidia and kernel versions to cover these problems whenever Slackware runs into them. — TommyC 2014/05/12 06:39

Thanks to Ryan McQuen, there is now a fully automated install script available for bumblebee. Details are in the readme on github. — whitewolf1776 2014/10/07 0932

A few places there is reference to unsupported or missing slackbuilds. This is incorrect and I thought would be updated by now, but specifically, I maintain branches for 14.0 and now 14.1 as -current has moved on and changed adding libvdpau to the core slackware install now. As such it will be removed from the master repo but will still be available via the 14.1 branch, just as the mesa patch is available via the 14.0 branch. Also, just as a heads up, bumblebee is gearing up for a new release, likely early in the new year. I'll let you know when they decide to update it what will need to change. Thanks. — whitewolf1776 2014/12/22 0951

The crazybee script now has a stable option. When you get a chance please update the page to reflect that. Details can be found on the github site. Thanks. — whitewolf1776 2015/02/09

Why this instruction “COMPAT32=yes ./nvidia-kernel.SlackBuild” says to use the COMPAT32=yes if in the nvidia-kernel.Slackbuild there is no such COMPAT32 switch? — br_orion 2015/02/25

Likely an oversight on my part when i inherited the scripts. It is not needed by the nvidia-kernel in any way. Nice catch br_orion, thx :) TommyC, update please when you get the time, the README on github is updated. – whitewolf1776 2015/02/25

Updated info. except about the version branches. I'll get to those later since some -current updates have added some of the bumblebee dependencies for some of the branches (including libjpeg-turbo for the VirtualGL option), been a busy quarter too. — TommyC 2015/04/23 23:03
 talk:howtos:hardware:nvidia_optimus ()