Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Installing Unity 3d on Ubuntu 12.04 with NVIDIA card

Two day's fight is over - with a (small) victory - I've got Unity 3d on my fresh Ubuntu 12.04 install.
Right after OS installation I had a working Unity 2d and my video drivers had not provided GLX support. Then I'd spent 2 days trying to install and make works NVIDIA proprietary drivers - no luck. Finally I'd decided to switch to the open-source NVIDIA drivers provided by Bumblebee Project and it worked out!
Now I have all the Unity 3d stuff, both commands
glxinfo
glxgears
run successfully.

Here are the steps I've done to install Bamboo drivers:
  1. Remove NVIDIA stuff
    sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo nvidia-uninstall
  2. Install Bamboo
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
at

2 comments:

  1. UnknownThursday, August 02, 2012 3:42:00 PM

    Great! I found these instructions in some board, too, and it's the *only* way it works. I have to know, i tried everything else.
    I managed to get the proprietary nvidia drivers to work, but then Unity would only run in 2D (it lost all 3D and compiz features).

    Just two additions:

    1. When purging nvidia*, this will also remove ubuntu-desktop. No problem, though:
    Purging the package does not shut lightdm down, so you can do this within the desktop environment.
    Just do

    sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

    at the very end, before restarting your machine.
    This will also pull and install nvidia-common, which is fine, as this doesn't touch any drivers. Perhaps it's just a virtual package.

    2. I had to do a re-install of ubuntu, then these instructions worked. Probably because is messed around so much with nearly everything in my desparation (xorg.conf, i installed nvidia-current-updates ... i followed every trace in hundreds of posts).

    As of now (October 3rd, 2012), this is *the* way to get your nvidia optimus graphics card running on Ubuntu.
    I was close to send my new Asus N65VZ back to the store.

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  2. Artem ShiyanovTuesday, August 14, 2012 12:04:00 PM

    Tobias, thanks for comment!
    For some in my case reason purging nvidia* stuff hadn't produced ubuntu-desktop trashing. And no OS reinstallations had been needed.

    ReplyDelete