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I recently purchased a Sager NP8651 with both NVIDIA 970M and an Intel 4600HD on the Haswell chip. By default, the Nouveau drivers are loaded (no hardware found in Additional Drivers). I have tried installing xorg-video-intel, nvidia-304, nvidia-330, nvidia-340, nvidia-346 after blacklisting Nouveau in the grub configuration with no luck. I also installed the driver manually from the Nvidia website. This issue persists on Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10.

The driver never gets loaded properly. /var/log/X.log.0 indicates that No device was detected after loading the driver. Prior to creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf with nvidia-xconfig, the default resolution is 4K which is very difficult to use without increasing the DPI and font which causes visual defects in many programs. I would prefer to use 2048x1152 or 1920x1080 by default. Only one resolution is available (3840 x 2160) which is listed at 0.0 Hz for some reason and xrandr is unable to add new resolutions.

I would be content disabling the Nvidia driver entirely or using Nouveau if I could just change the resolution. With no xorg.conf configuration in, (with or without Nvidia driver installed) video playback will work smoothly for a few minutes beforing crashing the X server (and Ctrl+Alt+Fn key no longer respond; the only option I found is to reset power).

Once xorg.conf is generated by nvidia-xconfig, the only resolutions available are 800x600 and 640x480. nvidia-settings indicates the driver is not loaded and xrandr is still unable to create new resolutions. Could there be a configuration conflict with the Intel driver?

Zanna
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Chris L
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  • One thing I have found to work is the Intel graphics installer for linux (https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/2014/intelr-graLhics-installer-linux-1.0.7). After installing this, I was able to use xrandr to create new resolutions and switch to them. – Chris L Jan 21 '15 at 02:52
  • I noticed Nvidia site says they added support for as early as version 343.36 as well however that version hasn't worked for me either (http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/80145).

    'inxi -G' is useful to display what graphics hardware/drivers are in use.

     – Chris L Jan 21 '15 at 02:59
  • hi, I know its out of context but, I own the same laptop and the headphone jack is not working. were you facing this issue? – kAnNaN Jan 28 '15 at 04:08
  • I did not face this issue, however on Windows 8, the speaker out (jack furthest from the screen) has a red light for some reason (not present on linux). Both headphone and speaker out work on windows, but only one of them works on linux. Did you try both the headphone jack and the speaker out jack? – Chris L Jan 30 '15 at 00:02
  • The one with the red light is the S/PDIF audio out the one the other end is the headphones jack. The headphones jack is not working for me. (Note: I think we should not plug a headphone ins S/PDIF port, not sure though) – kAnNaN Jan 30 '15 at 04:53

3 Answers3

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I finally got the nvidia driver and screen resolution working with the latest nvidia 346.47 driver from the x-edgers PPA.

It is essential to remove nomodeset from the grub configuration file /etc/default/grub. Then run

sudo update-grub
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-346-dev bumblebee-nvidia
sudo shutdown -r 0

Then xrandr will work correctly (and so does the settings GUI for screen resolution).

I am still having problems with "primusrun", however nvidia-settings has an option to select the GPU you want to use so I am not sure if bumblebee is even needed. glxgears will now run at ~2000FPS in 4K!

Zanna
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Chris L
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There is no direct support for nVidia optimus for linux. nVidia Optimus dynamically switches between the integrated GPU and discreet GPU inorder to improve battery life. However there could be work around, check this link

How to set up nVidia Optimus/Bumblebee in 14.04

Community
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ramkrishna
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  • I tried many variations on this with 14.04 and 14.10, and was able to install the 346 driver on with bumblebee. By running "primusrun glxinfo" I was able to see the driver was NVIDIA, however glxinfo is the only program I could run with primusrun: all other programs such as glxgears, glmark2, steam, and wine encountered segmentation faults. I also tried "sudo prime-select nvidia", but this caused the X server to crash once it was restarted. Perhaps future updates will fix these issues. – Chris L Jan 30 '15 at 00:09
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Update: later versions of Ubuntu such as 16.10 resolved these graphics installations issues for Nvidia 970M / Intel 4600HD by using the automated restricted hardware drivers GUI installer. Thanks Ubuntu Devs!

Chris L
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