Installing NVIDIA drivers in Linux Mint 17.3 on Acer Aspire E5-573G

Discussion

As it seems, my laptop has an hybrid system composed of an Intel integrated GPU and a NVIDIA discrete GPU. NVIDIA's Optimus technology is supposed to leverage the use of both depending on processing power demands and power requirements, but the support with GNU/Linux is not completely ok.

Several choices exist to make this work:

  • Official NVIDIA support: Non-realtime switching of both GPUs, though the package nvidia-prime.
  • BIOS switching: non-supported on my laptop.
  • Nouveau PRIME: switch between both GPUs using the Nouveau open source drivers .
  • Bumblebee

Some resources on how to install NVIDIA stuff:

Things I've already tried:

Before you proceed with the following please consider removing other nvidia drivers that might conflict.

For the latest proprietary Nvidia driver the following commands may be issued :

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

For Nvidia Optimus technology (Nvidia+Intel) and the benefit of Bumblebee features the following must be issued :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER

A final tip is to remember using optirun command in prefix of the 3D software command

optirun somegame-or-command

You can also test 3D with the following commands

glxspheres 
optirun glxspheres

Alternative way

  1. Find out which is your suitable driver: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
  2. Download it

Sources

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