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I am planing to buy a new laptop and use an external 27 inch monitor with 2560 x 1440 px resolution on ubuntu for work.

I keep reading that the Nvidia Optimus technology isn't well supported on Linux. I am not really interested in using the Nvidia card on my Ubuntu partition I just want to connect the monitor there, but I read, that I cannot connect a monitor with such a high resolution on such a notebook.

If anyone has experience using an Nvidia card with Optimus technology or even better the exact laptop in question (Alienware M17x with NVIDIA® GTX 680M ) it would be great.

Kaybe an option is to disable the nvidia card in bios while i use ubuntu? And if i start my gameing-partition, I re-enable it before? But I heard, that then the external display-port is disabled too then.

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If you're thinking about one of those Korean 27" monitors from ebay - they explicitly state that laptop video adapters are not supported and provide a definite list of (desktop, full-size, not integrated) video cards which are supported. – Sergey Jan 4 at 23:18
Do you think a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 with Intel HD 3000 would work? I could also buy any other 27'' monitor – rubo77 Jan 4 at 23:35
I'm not sure - just go to Ebay, search for, say, 'crossover 27" monitor' and check the first few links - they all have compatibility charts which list only NVidia and AMD cards and directly say that laptops are not supported. I'm not sure about monitors from Dell or Apple. – Sergey Jan 4 at 23:50
There are still issues to work out with optimus, like what David Airlie calls "reverse optimus" to make HDMI and other video outputs work straight from the nVidia card: airlied.livejournal.com/76723.html Please join this team (launchpad.net/~hybrid-graphics-linux) 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. – 213441265152351 Mar 30 at 18:38

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