Steam with NVIDIA Optimus

[evenadam]

Does anybody know the procedure for running steam games with the NVIDIA gpu in a laptop with an Intel/NVIDIA hybrid system on Mint Cinnamon 17.1? I managed to do it fine using bumblebee in Ubuntu a while ago, but it just won't work on Mint. I've been trying for about 10 hours (including a complete reinstall of Mint), and I've tried everything I've found from Googling, but everything just makes it worse (now I can't get Mint to detect the NVIDIA card at all). I'm going to do another fresh install tomorrow, so I'd appreciate it if anybody could tell me exactly what they did to get it to work.

Thanks.

[Ryu945]

I had the same problem. I eventually solved it and wrote this guide: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... us#p974152

[evenadam]

There is no mention of steam there.

Does anybody know how to get Steam working with bumblebee?

[Ryu945]

You run steam in play on linux. The fix I described for league of legends. Do that for steam.

[evenadam]

Oh, I see. Thanks, but I want to run the native linux steam client.

[evenadam]

Seriously, has nobody else had a problem with this?

[evenadam]

If any Googlers find this, and are having a problem with launching Valve Source games with optirun/primusrun (the terminal saying something like "malloc: assertion botched"), I think I have solved this on my laptop with Intel/Nvidia hybrid graphics (the Nvidia card is NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M and I am running linux mint 17.1 cinnamon with all updates installed).

I did the following:

First uninstall everything that could conflict:

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sudo apt-get purge nvidia* bumblebee* bbswitch* primus*

(it maybe useful to add virtualgl* to the above command. I didn't because I knew for certain I didn't have virtualgl installed.)

Follow the no-install-recommends method given here with a slight modification:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee

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sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends bumblebee
sudo apt-get install bumblebee-nvidia nvidia-331
sudo apt-get install primus 
sudo apt-get install primus-libs-ia32

(I used nvidia-331 because it is the driver recommended to me by Mint's driver manager)

Then, rename the 64-bit primus library for safe-keeping

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sudo mv /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/primus/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/primus/libGL.so.1.bak

(If this method causes problems with other 64-bit programs, I guess this will be the step to reverse)

Then, create a symbolic link in its place to the 32bit primus library

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sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/primus/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/primus/libGL.so.1

Since doing this I have tried TF2 and L4D2 without problems.

EDIT: I should add, I have to use 'primusrun' or 'optirun -b primus' for this to work.

[Ryu945]

In case there instruction are not clear to you. The link I gave also discusses how to install nvidia optimus and bumblebee. It also talks about how to fix the launch shortcut so that it runs linux steam with the nvidia graphics card and not the intel graphics card.

[SpookyWatcher]

Seriously, has nobody else had a problem with this?

Yup...here you go. Step by step. Works butter smooth! hope it helps. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=198251

An important part for me was...I HAD to uninstall Steam AND my local content. I had to reinstall Steam Native and re-download my games. I just backed up my save games and put them back when done installing.

Spooky