This tutorial is going to show you how to turn on/off the discrete nVidia graphics card on nVidia Optimus Ubuntu laptop.

For now, nVidia Optimus doesn’t support Linux system. If you have two graphics card, an integrated Intel graphics card and a discrete NVIDIA card, you can use bumblebee to make this Nvidia Optimus enabled laptop work in GNU/Linux system.

Or, here’s the way to turn off discrete nVidia graphics card:

1. Install bbswitch

bbswitch is a kernel module for toggling the power on nVidia Optimus video cards.

Open terminal from the dash home, install bbswitch with 3 commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install bbswitch

2. Use bbswitch to turn off/on discrete nVidia graphics card.

First of all, get the root privilege by this command:

sudo -i

1.) To get the status of the nVidia graphics card:

cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch

2.) Turn the card off, respectively on, run:

    tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<OFF

    tee /proc/acpi/bbswitch <<<ON

If the card stays on when trying to disable it, you’ve probably forgotten to unload the driver, run this to unload:

modprobe -r nouveau

3.) Disable card on boot.

echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
echo "bbswitch load_state=0" >> /etc/modules
update-initramfs -u