bumblebee-nvidia should remove nvidia-prime (conflicting packages)

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1268217

There is no need to remove nvidia-prime to install bumblebee. I installed bumblebee here in trusty, and I disabled nvidia card in the Nvidia Settings, so now it uses Intel card all the time, and primusrun & optirun runs normally Nvidia card (you have to configure /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf and add bumblebee in your user, as well).

Tested with nvidia-331-updates (331.38) and linux 3.15-rc7 from canonical mainline.

Well, I suppose bumblebee should provide, replace and conflicts hybrid-graphics if they are indeed incompatible (which would make sense).

@Alberto Milone: added you to CC, do you have any opinion on this?

Related: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bumblebee-ppa/issues/32

I don't see any technical reason why an end user couldn't have both nvidia-prime and bumblebee installed on their laptop, and be able to choose to use one or the other at any given time (although not both at the same time).

I'm not familiar with bumblebee but I'm pretty sure nvidia-prime per se is not the problem here. All the heavy lifting is done by the gpu-manager binary in the ubuntu-driver-common package. If you give me an easy way to check if bumblebee is in use (e.g. checking the existence of a file, etc.), I'll make sure that the gpu-manager doesn't modify the system when this is the case.

Sorry for the long delay.

After a bit more looking at this, I agree with you. To know whether Bumblebee is in use, you can simply check for the existence of /var/run/bumblebee.socket I think.

But we need to add more documentation for end users on this (else some might report optirun is not working while on a PRIME session or being unable to switch to a PRIME session while bumblebeed is running).

On Bumblebee side, we might want to add a detection to see if the system is currently running X only on the Intel card and else fail to start. Because it won’t work if running on the nvidia card (don’t know in what it results currently when you try to start bumblebeed while on a PRIME session), and it won’t work if the primary X server allready took possession of the nvidia card.

Also, added Peter (@lekensteyn), because he might be more aware of all this than me, have more ideas, and actually be able to change things on bumblebeed side if needed.

You can have both bumblebee and nvidia-prime installed. Even nouveau + PRIME would work, it just requires appriopriate configuration. This could be useful for experimenting or if you want to use bumblebeed/bbswitch to save power and to use nvidia-prime at other times (requires restarting X though).

Detecting whether bumblebee is enabled or not probably requires checking for checking whether `/etc/init/bumblebeed.conf.override` contains `manual`. Upon installation the daemon is always started, but it might fail to start in some cases (when the graphics card is hidden via BIOS settings for example).