Upgrading to newest nVidia drivers on a laptop that uses Optimus? (Ubuntu 15.04)

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 15.04 on a laptop with an Intel HD Graphics 5000 and a nVidia GeForce 520M, joined by an Optimus. I'm trying to upgrade my graphics drivers to the latest provided by the vendor so I can use the new experimental build of Unity 3D.

However, when I try switch to any driver besides the default open source one, glxinfo gives me this error:

X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
Major opcode of failed request:  154 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request:  24 (X_GLXCreateNewContext)
Value in failed request:  0x0
Serial number of failed request:  33
Current serial number in output stream:  34

...and then when I reboot, my graphics don't work, so I have to revert to the old drivers via the command line. The thing is, I've been able to use Optimus on this laptop before (via optirun).

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

ubuntu is getting good at bundling vendor graphics drivers so having to download and install manually is not necessarily the go to solution. Try this :

System Settings -> Software & Updates -> Additional Drivers

give it time to do its probes/lookups and it will respond with list of pre-loaded drivers from which you can pick an Nvidia if you wish. This does work.