NVidia GF 555 and HDMI monitor on 12.04

Question

I know there are issues with this, but I haven't heard of a resolution. And some of the suggestions just confuse me.

I have a Dell XPS with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M with Optimus running Precise Pangolin.

I've installed bumblebee and the everything works pretty well, EXCEPT for my HDMI port to my external monitor. I use this for a dual monitor with the laptop screen as my primary. The external monitor is basically just non-functional when running Ubuntu. At best, if I run bumblebee I can get it to see that it's connected, but the best I've ever gotten is a black screen with a mouse cursor on it.

My questions:

1. Should I be running NVidia's drivers? I've read some posts that say I should and some posts that say I absolutely can't without breaking everything. I had installed them previously and ended up messing things up so badly, I had to start over. But are they better now?

2. Is there some trick to getting bumblebee to see the external monitor?

It just fries me that Winders can do this, but Ubuntu can't. I know NVidia supports windows better, but ... I just hate having to admit that it won't work with Ubuntu.

thanks for any ideas.

Answer 1

Try the new version of bumblebee comes with a new primus system with better performance than optirun:

http://raw.github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/master/doc/RELEASE_NOTES_3_1

There are still issues to work out, like what David Airlie calls "reverse optimus" to make HDMI and other video outputs work straight from the nVidia card: http://airlied.livejournal.com/76723.html

Please join this team if you are new by clicking on the "Join Team" link at the right of the Launchpad page. It's important to have as many users in the community as possible to request for appropriate support, even if you found a non-obvious way to make it work for you.