I’m having some small troubles with my Intel/NVIDIA (Optimus) graphical card on Ubuntu 13.04: Raring Ringtail. It worked perfeclty on Ubuntu 12.10. Only thing I had to do was to add the bumblebee stable ppa, install it and GO!

Since 13.04 I’m having some graphical glitches. As it’s almost release date I would have thought they would be fixed by now. But nothing is more false (danglish?). It are some little anoyances: sometimes X won’t start at boot. Once a week X freezes. That kind of stuff.

Maybe it’s some weird system setting I did or maybe it’s truly some bug in Ubuntu 13.04 with Intel/NVIDIA. Because I play nog games on my laptop I decided to get rid of NVIDIA/nouveau altogether and disable the NVIDIA card. Maybe that fixes the issue.

Here’s what I did:

Install the bumblebee ppa:

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add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
apt-get update

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/bumblebee-stable-raring.list should then look like this:

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deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bumblebee/stable/ubuntu raring main
# deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bumblebee/stable/ubuntu raring main

Install bbswitch:

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apt-get install bbswitch-dkms

Add bsswitch to /etc/modules and disable the NVIDIA card by default:

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bbswitch load_state=0

blacklist the nouveau driver in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

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blacklist nouveau

So far (knock on wood) I haven’t had any false boots or lockups. If they remain I will post an update here.