Nvidia gt555m and Ubuntu 11.10 drivers

Question

I have a laptop with the Nvidia gt555m on it but i want to use its full power not just the on board graphics. I tried installing the driver provided by Nvidia at
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-295.20-driver.html
no luck, my pc boots to a black screen with white letters. My card does not show up under proprietary drivers either so i can't find a solution. I have formatted my PC three times now in a day to get past the black screen. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It's possible that the graphic card has the optimus chip in it, if so you're a bit out of luck

There's Bumblebee to support nVidia Optimus though

Post your lspci -vnnn | grep VGA

You should read this article How well will Nvidia Optimus cards be supported in 12.04?

If you find that you do have Optimus enabled and want to use it, you can install Bumblebee like so:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

If you are on Ubuntu 11.04 or older and want newer drivers (recommended) than the ones available in the official repos, run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update

Install Bumblebee using the proprietary nvidia driver:

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER 

Note: No need to change $USER, this variable is set to your username.

Reboot or re-login.

If you intend to run 32-bit programs like Wine and using Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric or later, install 32-bit libraries with:

sudo apt-get install virtualgl-libs:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libc6:i386