I have a sony vaio laptop with an integrated Intel graphics card (i910 I believe) and an ATI 6xxx card. By default, Fedora 17 uses the intel card. I'm aware of the vgaswitch method and how to turn off the discreet card, but I can't seem to figure out how to switch to the discreet ATI card and then disable the Intel card. I can only find instructions for turning off the discreet card.

Right now I'm using a stock Fedora 17 install (KDE) without any additional ATI drivers. What do I need to do to switch outputs to the ATI card and then power off the integrated intel card?

There's vga_switcheroo, but as I understand it... it's experimental and there was an overheating problem, which I don't know whether it is solved or not...

Apparently, it doesn't switch off the integrated graphics,... Using the more power hungry ATI graphics apparently will do some sort of pass-through to the framebuffer, bypassing the integrated graphics...

Since I don't have this kind of hardware,... I can't be of more help.

I've been using vgaswitcharoo to switch cards, however, whenever I seem to setup a script to switch to the discreet card on boot X fails to load. I get no error or message at all and no interaction will get me to a command prompt. I essentially need to do a hard reboot and go into a recovery/failsafe mode and remove my changes from the script.

I've had the script disable the ATI card on startup to save battery life, but I'm now using it to switch graphics card outputs.