I am a bit confused of what is needed to make my laptop work with an external monitor. I have a Gigabyte Aero 15. I had no issues installing Ubuntu 18, but the intel gpu is used by default. I installed the nvidia drivers, and now, I am only able to use either the external monitor or my laptop screen based on the GPU I select.
For example:
- if I run
sudo prime-select nvidia
, I can connect an external monitor via the hdmi port, but the laptop screen is black with a cursor at the top left, - if I run
sudo prime-select intel
, I cannot connect an external monitor via the hdmi port (i.e., the external monitor doesn't detect the computer is connected), but the laptop screen works.
I tried searching, and I think my GPU may be an NVIDIA Optimus GPU (although unsure how to verify). My issue is I want to be able to use the nvidia gpu or intel gpu with both monitors (I don't need the graphics to switch in real-time, I am fine with rebooting as needed to switch from nvidia to intel - although I do want to be able to use the laptop screen + external monitor with nvidia).
Is bumblebee the solution? If so, do I need to reinstall drivers or use different drivers? update the kernal? I am not familiar with nvidia optimus or bumblebee, and I am a bit confused as to what I need to do, and I don't want to start installing and editing system files naively.
uname -r
. The GA kernel will be 4.15 where as the last & final kernel of HWE is 5.4 (the GA kernel from the next LTS release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS). Kernel of course impacts kernel modules in use; kernel modules being referred to mostly as drivers. Most of the remaining digits are update indicators, generic kernel will say so, or low-latency etc, if using an OEM kernel you'll see that in the text etc