External Monitor for Lenovo W530 Running Linux Mint 17

Update: As of January 4, 2015 this no longer works for me.  I updated and something broke.  Getting the error "[36741.873484] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): EVO Push buffer channel allocation failed".  Hopefully this is still helpful to some out there however.

Well, I have some exciting news - after 2 years of messing around with trying to get my Optimus enabled videocard to work with an external monitor in Linux, I have finally found the right combination of blog posts to make it work.

My setup:

• Lenovo W530
• NVIDIA Quadro K1000M videocard
• Linux Mint 17 (which is based on Ubuntu 14.04 I believe)

Credit:

• scyth and his or her blog post on from December 19, 2013
• Lucas and his blog post from May 23, 2014
• the commentors of the aforementioned blogs for changes and scripts

Preliminaries:

So, as scyth mentions one of the ways that you can get an external monitor setup to work with an Optimus card is to go into your bios and just disable Optimus, turn the setting to "Discrete".  In our case, we'd like to be able to have increased battery life when not plugged in, so first we are going to:

• enable the Optimus technology and
• enable Optimus OS Detection

in the Display section of bios.

NVIDIA drivers:

Next, we install the latest NVIDIA drivers (I installed 340, I believe 346 is available as of Dec 2, 2014):

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa   
 sudo apt-get update   
 sudo apt-get install nvidia-340  

Install bumblebee:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable  
 sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia bbswitch-dkms  

Scyth recommends a reboot - probably a good idea!

Configure bumblebee:

Set the following parameters in your /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf

 KeepUnusedXServer=true  
 Driver=nvidia  
 KernelDriver=nvidia-331  
 PMMethod=none (find this one in two locations in the file)  

Then edit /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia to look like:

 Section "ServerLayout"  
   Identifier  "Layout0"  
 EndSection  
 Section "Device"  
   Identifier  "DiscreteNvidia"  
   Driver    "nvidia"  
   VendorName  "NVIDIA Corporation"  
   BusID     "PCI:01:00:0"  
   Option    "ProbeAllGpus" "false"  
   Option    "NoLogo" "true"  
 EndSection  

 Up until now I have been copying step for step from scyth's post.  In this next part we will be compiling a tool called intel-virtual-output which seems to be the reason this wonderful external monitor business is possible!

Install Tools:

First we will ensure we have the right tools:

 sudo apt-get install xorg-dev git autoconf automake libtool xutils-dev  

You likely will not need git, however I included it because that's what I did when I did my own setup.

Intel Driver Update:

Second - you will need to update your xf86-video-intel driver (2.99).  Ubuntu 13.10 is supposed to come with this, however I ended up updating xserver-xorg-video-intel through the package manager (Menu -> Package Manager -> Quick Filter search for the above, double click, "apply").  I did this because I could not get the intel-virtual-output tool to compile and thought this might be the reason - likely not necessary, but didn't hurt either for me.

Next in this step I followed Lucas' directions and downloaded the source from https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads, choosing the latest "xf86-video-intel" - 2.99.911 for me.  Then configured and compiled the source.

 tar -xvf xf86-video-intel-2.99.911.tar.gz  
 cd xf86-video-intel-2.99.911/  
 ./configure  
 make  
 sudo make install  

Ensure that the intel-virtual-output command is available in bash (using tab-complete to check).  If not, you will need to copy this file (located in "tools" of the current directory) to /usr/bin.

Install Primus:

The last thing that I needed to do was install primus - I was getting an error (something about "no bridge"?) when I tried to start the external monitor without primus.

 sudo apt-get install primus  

Go Time!

Finally - plug in a monitor and fire up that discrete videocard!

 sudo modprobe bbswitch  
 sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<ON # will need after turning off the first time  
 optirun true  
 intel-virtual-output  
 mate-display-properties  

The mate-display-properties was to turn on the external monitor and position it correctly.  You may not need the second line if this is the first time connecting an external monitor since last reboot.

Save Power When Mobile:

Lastly, when disconnecting the external monitor we will want to turn the card off for power savings:

 PID=$(ps ax | grep Xorg | grep :8 | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}')  
 if [ ! -z $PID ]; then  
     sudo kill -15 $PID  
 fi  
 sudo rmmod nvidia  
 sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<OFF  
 mate-display-properties  

The credit for the top 4 lines goes to Krzysztof Suszyski and his github gist: https://gist.github.com/cardil/10533170.

You can substitute the first line for a ps ax | grep Xorg followed by a sudo kill -15 <process id found> and ignore the if-statement.  These are in script form that I use now however.  The mate-display-properties here was so that we could turn off the external monitor - my install seemed to think that there was still another screen there even after everyone was "turned off".  This might be an indication that something didn't turn off correctly I suppose, but I haven't checked the battery life yet.

That *should* be it.  If something went wrong, cross-reference with scyth and Lucas' blogs.