Set Nvidia 331 as default driver for optimus cards in Ubuntu 13.10

Optimus cards running in Linux don’t enjoy the same level of support from Nvidia as its Windows counterpart. Using bumblebee gives people some control over the two graphics cards and power management but dynamic switching isn’t available yet. Anyone using optimus cards for gaming or some graphics intensive program will have to invoke the game or the program manually from terminal with a prefix command ‘optirun’ or ‘primusrun’. This is because by default bumblebee will set to use the Intel graphics.

Using Intel Ironlake by default in bumblebee

This can get annoying at times and also may not work. So, to permanently enable Nvidia graphics card instead of Intel, you have to use nvidia-prime. It’s a package available in the Ubuntu repositories. The only drawback of using this is that, continued use of Nvidia GPU will drain your laptop battery faster and your laptop may heat up. You can use the latest kernel 3.12 as has initial support for dynamic switching for optimus.

xorg-edgers ppa

To get nvidia-331 you will need to install the xorg-edgers ppa . This will enable nvidia-331 packages
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Remove bumblebee

Bumblebee and all its associated packages need to be removed before installing nvidia-prime
sudo apt-get remove –purge bumblebee nvidia-304 nvidia-settings-304 bbswitch-dkms bumblebee-nvidia
sudo apt-get autoremove –purge

Install nvidia-331

sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 nvidia-settings-331 nvidia-prime

Install kernel 3.12

Download the 3.12 kernel packages from Ubuntu mainline kernel ppa site.

For 32bit

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy/linux-headers-3.12.0-031200-generic_3.12.0-031200.201311031935_i386.deb
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy/linux-headers-3.12.0-031200_3.12.0-031200.201311031935_all.deb
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy/linux-image-3.12.0-031200-generic_3.12.0-031200.201311031935_i386.deb

For x64

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy/linux-headers-3.12.0-031200-generic_3.12.0-031200.201311031935_amd64.deb
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy/linux-headers-3.12.0-031200_3.12.0-031200.201311031935_all.deb
wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy/linux-image-3.12.0-031200-generic_3.12.0-031200.201311031935_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.12.0-*.deb linux-image-3.12.0-*.deb

Once finished, reboot and by default, Ubuntu will boot into kernel 3.12 and it will be nvidia graphics card driver .

Using Nvidia 331 graphics card by default