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kryton9
11-05-2012, 04:01
I've am having a blast trying out many linux distros these passed few days.

My main gaming notebook with Windows 7 has a usb 3.0 port. I bought a usb 3.0 stick and have been using that to try out the different distros. USB 3 is very fast and makes it very feasible to run linux completely off of it. I install the install linux distro iso onto a usb 2.0 thumbdrive and from that do an installation onto the usb 3.0 drive. Making sure to put the boot loader on the usb 3 drive.

Anyways, I have had no luck in getting opengl or any of the distros to see my nvidia card. Then last night after so many days it hit me that this notebook had optimus in it. This allows intel graphics when non intensive graphics are not needed and only uses the nvidia for the intensive stuff.

This lead me to a project named Bumblebee and it solved all my problems.

Now I am in the process of settling on which distro to use.

Since my last playing with linux, it seems the world has changed with Unity for Ubuntu and gnome 3 for other distros.
I liked the old gnome classic as they call it and going for that.

Anyways if you have optimus and want to try linux with opengl here is the page that showed me how:
http://ubuntuportal.com/bumblebee-3-0-tumblewed-nvidia-optimus-gpu-switching-for-linux-has-been-released-how-to-install-bumblebee-3-0-on-ubuntu/

kryton9
11-05-2012, 05:40
In Ubuntu 64 bit, glxspheres got a little over 1fps. With optirun it got around 60fps.

I just setup linuxmint64 with Mate (gnome2 fork project) and linuxmint after the install saw my video card as intel and even brought up the nvidia driver install. Not that it worked, but that was more than ubuntu could do.
I however went and did the bumblebee install and the same instructions worked on linuxmint.
Here are my scores, needless to say... I am very happy:

k9@k9-Aspire-5755G ~ $ glxspheres
Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0xa6
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Mobile
60.227503 frames/sec - 67.213893 Mpixels/sec
60.169836 frames/sec - 67.149537 Mpixels/sec
60.179368 frames/sec - 67.160175 Mpixels/sec
60.149462 frames/sec - 67.126799 Mpixels/sec
60.180167 frames/sec - 67.161067 Mpixels/sec
60.179825 frames/sec - 67.160684 Mpixels/sec
60.182258 frames/sec - 67.163400 Mpixels/sec
60.179025 frames/sec - 67.159792 Mpixels/sec
60.178590 frames/sec - 67.159307 Mpixels/sec
60.173239 frames/sec - 67.153335 Mpixels/sec
k9@k9-Aspire-5755G ~ $ optirun glxspheres
Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0x21
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: GeForce GT 540M/PCI/SSE2
109.806870 frames/sec - 122.544467 Mpixels/sec
115.166497 frames/sec - 128.525811 Mpixels/sec
111.689481 frames/sec - 124.645461 Mpixels/sec
110.932702 frames/sec - 123.800895 Mpixels/sec
105.914080 frames/sec - 118.200114 Mpixels/sec