As you may have read in my other posts, I had solved almost all of my dual graphics cards problems. I was able to completely switch off the nvidia side of my optimus graphics card. This was great and I gained around 2 hours of battery life by doing this! Click here to read about that.
The downside, is that the bbswitch module that takes care of turning the card off, has to be loaded and configured each time the system is rebooted.
To me, since the nouveau driver is ‘part’ of my system, the only way to disable it would be to remove it with synaptic or apt-get. However, I would still like to keep it in case I want to try to install bumblebee at a later date.
So I created a simple script that carries out a few commands to load the module, disable the nouveau module, shut off the card and check the status at startup.
Here is my simple nvidiaShutdownScript.sh script:
#!/bin/bash
echo "removing nouveau driver..."
modprobe -r nouveau
sleep 1
echo "switching off discrete card"
sudo tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch << OFF
echo "status of card:"
cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch
In Debian, you can call simple scripts like this to run at startup from a file at:
/etc/rc.local
So open that file and you can run any script as if you were on the terminal.
My /etc/rc.local file now has a single line, which runs my script:
./home/trevor/nvidiaShutdownScript.sh
After making sure you have made your script executable, you can reboot and the script should be taken care of.
To test, I rebooted and used:
cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch
which reports the status of the discrete card as OFF if everything went well after restarting.
Yay! Now you have a nearly perfectly functioning Debian Squeeze distro running LXDE on an Asus U31SD. Lots of people have had trouble with the Nvidia / Intel Optimus graphics cards but at this point you have a system that boots up, disables the unwanted graphics card, and everything else works very well!
Next: Most of the ‘function’(Fn) keys actually work but what can we do with the ones that don’t? Click here to see an easy work-around for disabling the touchpad when typing or when a USB mouse is plugged in.