The release of SteamOS bring a slew of new exciting new games to our beloved platform, on top of hefty discounts on them as well as a couple of other titles. I just started playing Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and halfway through downloading Spec Ops: The Line.
I’m currently on 14.04 and it originally came with version 313 of Nvidia binary blob. This is fine if you want to play something on top of Wine/PlayOnlinux, or if you a rather old cards. Newer cards and native games requires updated driver. For example, ME: Shadow of Mordor requires you to e at least on 352.21 or later. You can of course download and install the driver directly from Nvidia, but that will require you to recompile the kernel module, every time you update your kernel. Well, as a matter of fact, there’s an a.. pt repository for that 😀
The Graphic Drivers PPA bundles updated nvidia binary drivers as well as bumblebee for Ubuntu version 14.04, 15.04, and 15.10. As of now, the newest Nvidia blob available on the PPA is version 358.
As usual, you need to add the repo to your source list
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
..and update:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
..and then install
sudo apt-get install nvidia-352 nvidia-settings
Do this only if you’re using bumblebee. Open the bumblebee config file:
sudo nano /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf
..And then make some changes:
[driver-nvidia] # Module name to load, defaults to Driver if empty or unset KernelDriver=nvidia-352 PMMethod=auto # colon-separated path to the nvidia libraries LibraryPath=/usr/lib/nvidia-352:/usr/lib32/nvidia-352 # comma-separated path of the directory containing nvidia_drv.so and the # default Xorg modules path XorgModulePath=/usr/lib/nvidia-352/xorg,/usr/lib/xorg/modules XorgConfFile=/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia
..then save. Rebuild bumblebee’s DKMS module
sudo apt-get install --reinstall bbswitch-dkms
..and restart bumblebee.
/etc/init.d/bumblebeed restart
and check if it’s running or not.
optirun firefox
If every thing is OK, firefox should start normally. If “optirun” fail, try restarting your box, and try running optirun again 😀