Install and usage

Here you will find instructions in many ways to install, test and use Bumblebee.

Install

The best and recommended way to install Bumblebee is through your distribution repositories. If not such packages exist, then you can still install Bumblebee manually from source.

Install from packages

ArchLinux

ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bumblebee

Stable Package: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=bumblebee

AUR Package (develop branch): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/bumblebee-git

Chakra

Chakra Wiki: https://chakraos.org/wiki/index.php?title=Bumblebee

Debian

Debian Wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/Bumblebee

Fedora

Fedora Wiki: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/bumblebee/index.html

Gentoo

Portage: http://packages.gentoo.org/package/x11-misc/bumblebee (emerge bumblebee)

Overlay: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bumblebee-gentoo/ (use layman -a bumblebee to add)

openSUSE

Wiki: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_Bumblebee

Package: https://software.opensuse.org/package/bumblebee

RHEL/CentOS

ELRepo: http://elrepo.org/tiki/bumblebee

Slackware

Slackware Docs: http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:nvidia_optimus

Ubuntu

Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee

PPA: https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee/+archive/stable

Dev PPA: https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee/+archive/testing

Install from source

Here are some instructions on how to build the Bumblebee daemon (bumblebeed) and client (optirun). Whenever you see a command preceded by # means it must be run as root (i.e. with sudo).

Prerequisites

Build Requirements

• the source tarball from https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/downloads
• a C compiler
• pkg-config
• glib-2.0 and development headers
• libX11 and development headers
• libbsd and development headers
• help2man (optional, but recommended)

If you're building from git, you'll also need:

• autotools (2.68+ recommended)

Runtime Requirements

• either VirtualGL or primus
• bbswitch (optional but recommended for Power Management)
• drivers. nouveau is an opensource choice. If you want to use the proprietary NVIDIA driver, you have to install it in a way such that its library files won't conflict with the Mesa libraries (notably libGL.so).

Build and install

After downloading the source tarball, extract and configure it:

$ tar xf bumblebee-VERSION.tar.gz
$ cd bumblebee-VERSION
$ ./configure

If you have retrieved the code from the git repository, you need to run autoreconf -fi prior to running ./configure.

To set your default driver to nvidia you need to pass some configuration flags to ./configure step:

$ ./configure CONF_DRIVER=nvidia CONF_DRIVER_MODULE_NVIDIA=nvidia-current \
  CONF_LDPATH_NVIDIA=/usr/lib/nvidia-current:/usr/lib32/nvidia-current \
  CONF_MODPATH_NVIDIA=/usr/lib/nvidia-current/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules

Note: Those settings are intended for Ubuntu users, your paths may differ. (See the Warning under Using Nvidia header in Supported Drivers for more information)

Note: the default installation path is /usr/local, configuration files will be installed to /usr/local/etc/bumblebee. To change this to /usr and /etc/bumblebee, use:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc

For more configuration options, run ./configure --help for more information.

Once the configuration has completed, build the binaries:

$ make

To install it system-wide:

# make install

Post-installation

Then you must create group bumblebee on your system and add yourself to it

# groupadd bumblebee
# gpasswd -a $USER bumblebee

Re-login to apply changes.

You're not ready to use Bumblebee yet, the daemon must be started first (see Usage below).

---

Usage

The daemon must be started before the client can be used.

Daemon (bumblebeed)

Have a look at Configuration for configuring Bumblebee. Often, no further modifications are needed.

The daemon can be started manually with:

# bumblebeed --daemon

For more command line options, run bumblebeed --help (or man bumblebeed if you've installed manpages).

If you want to start Bumblebee automatically when the system starts, you need to use an initscript. Some example initscripts have been build in the scripts/ directory. Refer to your distributions documentation for instructions on installing one.

To run a program you just run

$ optirun <program-name>

Client (optirun)

Run optirun --help for options or run man optirun if you've installed manual pages.

The next command runs the glxspheres program on the discrete video card:

$ optirun glxspheres