Arch Linux

drasticraft

Member

From: mars

Registered: 2013-07-05

Posts: 55

Website

How I got Xorg working under Optimus

I have just gone through the process of installing Arch Linux on my laptop(Dell Latitude E6420, NVS 4200M + Intel IGFX), without any major issues.

I used the Beginner's Guide, the Bumblebee wiki page, and the 'installing X' wiki page to assist my installation.

However, after trying to run X, xinit, or startx, the screen dimmed down and displayed only a single, unblinking white underscore in the upper left-hand corner. CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE doid not break out of that, nor did the (CTRL+)ALT+Fx keycombos work either.

When I pressed the power button the system would cleanly exit  and shut down.

I started rifling through the /etc/bumblebee/xorg.xonf.nvidia and saw a very helpful section of the file comments:
http://ix.io/fhV

(for those of you that don't know, ix.io is a command line paste service.)

After following those instructions, I set Option ProbeAllGpus to true. lo and behold, startx worked and gave me my twm desktop.

I hope this helps some people. It just goes to show you that reading file comments is something worth doing, and often.

**EDIT: So far only startx and window managers work under this method. (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=190379)

Last edited by drasticraft (2014-11-27 05:01:20)