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.
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.
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