Hello,

I got a brand new laptop with in it an Nvidia GT540M, this is a card with optimus technology. This means that(on windows) the laptop will switch between an intel video card and the nvidia one. To save battery life.

The problem is, i cant get my Nvidia driver to work. If i install the driver and run Nvidia-xconfig, i get the following error on start up: No screens found.

When i do lspci | grep VGA, i get back two video cards.
My theory is that xorg tries to use the nvidia driver for the Intel card(which i guess is selected by default) and that is the reason that it will not work.

How can i select the nvidia card, i do not have an option in my bios.
Also i already tried the software called bumblebee. This is supposed to let you switch between video cards. But since i use Mint(12) it will not work. There must be a way to select my other video bard. I read something about BusId but adding it to my xorg config did not help.

Please help!

The way I would attack that is with an Xorg.conf, which might have the following sections

Section Display
Video card one details

Section Display
video card 2 details.

In those, you may be able to specify pci.id.

Section Monitor
Monitor details

Then there's some master section where you stick them all together and tell X to use this monitor, that mouse, the nvidia card, etc.

Then you are able to specify the config file for X to use. Sorry to be so woolly, but I'm off sick atm.

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Could you please elaborate this a bit? I can't do a lot with this information sadly, i am certainly not an expert in Xorg.conf, so some examples to help me on my way would be great

Thanks for the effort/help tough!

Optimus...

Nvidia Optimus is reported as a headache for many linux users. Two solutions are being worked on, Bumblebee and its fork for Ubuntu, Ironhide, but this is probably one of the cases where you will need to be patient while the linux developers keep working on the solution. Nvidia does not plan any support for Optimus for linux.

https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project

https://launchpad.net/~mj-casalogic/+archive/ironhide

But it must be possible to select one videocard, i do not want to use the optimus inteligent switching technology. I just want my video card to work. At the moment i can't play games, etc..

Games, games...

As I've read the Internet posts, it's not possible to just use Nvidia and play away. Optimus uses both the Nvidia chip and an integrated Intel chip on the motherboard, one feeding to the other to produce the best graphics. There isn't a way around the architecture

.

?...

What about trying Optimus this way?

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/610O

Cannot switch to Nvidia Card.
So how can I turn off my Nvidia video card ? (asus ul80vt with geforce g210m 512mb)
I just want to use onboard card.
My laptop is working too hot whenever I'm on linux.
I don't want to use Nvidia in linux. I'm still searching in the net for a long time.
Any suggestions ?
How to turn off ?
Is there a way to turn it off with terminal ?

Google for "xorg.conf multi head" or the like. There's plenty of examples online for various configurations and loads of howtos. Loads of hits from this site. If people are working on extra software for it, though, xorg.conf alone is probably not going to work - why I don't know.