seemingly can't use nvidia graphics, issues with brightness and sleep

[dbaker]

I have a HP Pavilion with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M graphics card (see my signature for more details). I'm happy with the graphics performance except for the fact that I can't dim the screen at all, and when I put the computer to sleep, on waking it the display doesn't come back to life, even though you can hear that the computer has woken up again (fan whirring etc).
Although I haven't been able to find any relevant info about the waking-from-sleep issue, I did find this thread about the brightness issue which says that you need the proprietary NVIDIA drivers to be able to adjust brightness:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/74813...patible-laptop

Given that, I assumed that the sleep issue is also related to the graphics driver, so I tried to install proprietary NVIDIA drivers. I had a huge amount of trouble with this, and eventually figured out that my system seems unable to use the NVIDIA card at all.
See the output below (commands copied from http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...pu-is-active):



I found a possible explanation for the issue.
This is the driver for my graphics card: http://www.nvidia.com/download/drive...x/106780/en-us
In the "additional information" tab, it says the following:
"notebook and all-in-one desktop designs with switchable (hybrid) or Optimus graphics will not work if means to disable the integrated graphics in hardware are not available".
The wikipedia page for Optimus also says "When no software mechanism exists for switching between graphics adapters, the system cannot use the Nvidia GPU at all, even if an installed graphics driver would support it".

Apparently my graphics card supports Optimus graphics, and my guess is that a means to disable the integrated graphics is NOT available.

So...
Do you think my screen brightness and sleep issues are due to not being able to use the NVIDIA card, and is there possibly a hack/workaround to fix it? It's really impractical not being able to put my computer to sleep and I have very sensitive eyes so the brightness hurts them (I've made the UI as dark as possible but it's impossible to avoid bright white web pages, etc).

p.s. I noticed that when I close the lid of my laptop (I've set it to not sleep on close, because otherwise I have to hard shut it down since I can't do anything without a functional display), the display actually turns off when the lid is about an inch from closing, and turns on again on opening it. This must be a hardware switch of some kind.

[vinnywright]

have you been in the BIOS or UEFI settings to see if you can disable the on board graphics ?

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

Bumblebee-nvidia is in the repository.

[dbaker]

GreyGeek, I tried bumblebee-nvidia as well. I think I've tried every possible combination of different packages, boot options and installation methods to no avail.

Vinny, I checked the BIOS settings and couldn't see anything relating to the graphics card, unfortunately. I looked around pretty thoroughly. The settings are fairly limited.

I found this interesting but very old thread: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/top...ios-insydeh20/
It looks like you now can't access advanced BIOS settings at all, at least on HP laptops. I found lots of complaints on the HP forums about the locked BIOS, with people saying you can't unlock it, or if you try to (presumably with hacks) you risk bricking your computer. Someone even mentioned what sounds like the same issue I'm having with waking from sleep.

It's looking like I'll just have to live with this problem forever

[GreyGeek]

What is the integrated video chip?

My previous Acer had an Intel mobo, cpu and GPU with Nivdia as the second GPU. There was no setting to turn off the Intel GPU and let the Nividia chip become the primary GPU. When I installed Kubuntu it selected the Intel GPU and used the Nouveau driver. When I wanted to run Minecraft, or Stellarium, or FlightSim I had to prepend "optimus" with some some switches in front of the app name. I did this in the menu system so that when I clicked on those applications in the menu they ran with optiums automatically. Various apps required different switches, which I determined experimentally.

Just wondering ... did you install the kernel headers?

Am I right in assuming that Kubuntu is bypassing the integrated mobo GPU and trying to activate the Nivida chip and not the mobo GPU?
Did you start the bumblebee daemon (bumblebeed)?
If so, have you tried black listing the NVidia?

If you installed the NVidia driver try this:

sudo modprobe -v -r nouveau
sudo systemctl restart bumblebeed

[dbaker]

The kernel headers are already installed (assuming linux-headers-generic are they).

Am I right in assuming that Kubuntu is bypassing the integrated mobo GPU and trying to activate the Nivida chip and not the mobo GPU?

Actually it appears to be doing the opposite - unable, or refusing, to access the nvidia GPU. I took the following steps just now to try to prove this - they may mean something else entirely though:

1. reinstalled bumblebee-nvidia and nvidia-361 packages
2. disabled nouveau and restarted bumblebeed as per your instructions above
3. rebooted
4. got a completely black screen and no splash/login after boot (this is what happened every other time i tried to install the proprietary driver)
5. brought up a command line with ctrl-alt-f1 and ran commands to see what GPU was in use:

Hmmm. It's still using the integrated GPU, and it's saying it can't access the nvidia one cause it can't load the driver?!

So, I re-enabled nouveau and uninstalled the nvidia stuff yet again just so I can use Kubuntu. Sigh. (I'm not actually sure if I need to manually modprobe drivers. I thought it did it automatically? I have to reboot for any changes to occur anyway).

One more thing that might be relevant: I have nomodeset and pci=nomsi in my boot line. nomodeset has been there ever since I installed Kubuntu on this machine - I had to add it to be able to use the system at all. I can't remember the details but I think it was a nouveau issue.
I added pci=nomsi yesterday when I read that adding it had solved one person's issue with waking from sleep. It hasn't changed anything for me though.

[dbaker]

UPDATE!!!

I installed the development edition of KDE Neon on my other machine because I'd been wanting to try it for a while. It was delightful to use, so I thought I'd boot my main machine from a live USB of KDE Neon (the non-development version, just in case I wanted to install it permanently) and see how it ran on here.
Well, to my amazement, power management worked out of the box - along with blur effects, which weren't working in my existing Kubuntu install. So I just replaced Kubuntu with KDE Neon and everything works beautifully - it wakes up from sleep fine, I can change the brightness, there are lots of pretty desktop effects, etc.

While I'm super relieved to not have this problem anymore, it's frustrating not knowing what caused it in the first place. I feel especially bad for anyone who comes to this thread with the same issue and realises it's not genuinely "solved". So if that's you, I'm sorry!

[GreyGeek]

Don't get too frustrated.
As the updates continue to roll in most, if not all, problems will be solved and 16.04 will be golden. What you are seeing with Neon is a more rapid development cycle that is focused entirely on Plasma5.

My guest OS Neon is running as fast as my 16.04 host! But, I am having zero problems with 16..04 at the present.

[Snowhog]

The thing with KDE neon (user or developer editions) is that it is focused entirely on Plasma, and is why they strongly recommend that you download one of their .iso files and install from it; not to just 'add' their repository to an existing installation of Kubuntu, which means that you will have continuing conflicts between a mixed KDE4/Plasma installation and the pure Plasma that KDE neon is being developed against.