# nVidia Optimus fail...

## The_Great_Sephiroth

I am at a major roadblock right now. I have a brand-new Dell Latitude E5440 which has an Intel and an nVidia card in it. I cannot get X/SDDM to start. I can get it to a black screen with a white cursor. I have read and tried the recommendations on the wiki. Nothing is working. I cannot disable the Intel card in the BIOS. Help! This was due out the door today and I cannot get into the system outside of the shell. How can I make this work? Also, I do NOT want to use nouveau.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

I noticed in the SDDM log that it is receiving the wrong opcode. It then says there is an unknown session type. What do I do? I have to get this thing working NOW. I cannot believe how difficult this Optimus crap makes things. I've blown a day on this and nothing is working, I am in dire need of help ASAP! I have people breathing down my back for this piece of junk.

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## Yamakuzure

Why not set up the laptop for intel video *first* and sort out your optimus settings later? So you can get in at least?

Maybe this thread helps.

It seems you just need to configure your system to use the nvidia drivers alone, no need to shut off the intel card. Which wouldn't work on a muxless system anyway IIRC.

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## Fitzcarraldo

Can't say I'm an NVIDIA fan, and especially not of NVIDIA Optimus; too much fiddling around. Anyway, in case it is of help with your Dell laptop, here is what I did to be able to use only the NVIDIA driver or only the Intel driver on my Clevo laptop with Optimus: Switching between Intel and NVIDIA graphics processors on a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus hardware running Gentoo Linux. (I don't want to use Bumblebee.)

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

Yama, you are correct. This laptop does not have the BIOS option to disable it. My gaming Latitude DOES have the option, but it run Windows 7 Pro and works either way, so it doesn't matter. I was hoping this one had the option, but it doesn't.

I will read the article you linked from your Wordpress site. It looks kind of interesting and would give the end-user the ability to switch to whichever GPU he wants based on his needs. Thanks, and I will report back with success or failure.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

I realized something when working with your scripts. The directory for SDDM scripts was different. I had the correct setup, but the SDDm directory is /usr/share/sddm/scripts. It works! I did make a script based on yours to swap GPUs and I am now at a desktop using the Intel card. AWESOME!

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