Ubuntu 14.04 nvidia-prime "is it supported? no"

I have an Optimus laptop, a Dell XPS 15 L502, which I've had for a few years and have tried various things on (bumblebee, nvidia-prime, linux kernel optimus support).

The graphics card is an NVIDIA GT 540M.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 a few days ago and wanted to try nvidia-prime again (it wasn't working so great for me on 13.10), but nvidia-settings only tells me that it is not supported.

Software and Updates recognises the Nvidia card and drivers. Nvidia Settings currently gives me this:

** Message: PRIME: No offloading required. Abort
** Message: PRIME: is it supported? no

I've tried to purge and reinstall nvidia drivers a dozen times, I've tried with and without xorg.conf files, but still always the same thing.

I've followed all the guides I could find on Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, and various other places.

EDIT: I was having problem with booting into "low-graphics mode", but that was due to a bad lightdm configuration that broke when I upgraded. I also had some segmentation fault issues with nvidia-settings installing the wrong version of itself (this was fixed by reinstalling just nvidia-settings).

EDIT: Have also found this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-prime/+bug/1283439

Solution 1:

I have the same portable, I was using bumblebee before. But since 14.04 it was not working anymore and so now I switched to nvidia-prime. This is what I did:

Steps

• Install Nouveau driver through "Software & updates"

• Remove bumblebee or other installed nvidia drivers:

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

• An then reboot

• Install nvidia 331-updates driver through "Software & updates" (should also install nvidia-settings and nvidia-prime)

• Then reboot

Now run again nvidia-settings. This did it for me, more info here.

Solution 2:

I had a similar problem. This is just a note to whomever else might find it useful.

Things started working once I re-enabled optimus from BIOS.

It seems the developers didn't do enough error handling. There should really be a bug report about that.