Switch on/off nvidia card Asus UL30Vt, UL50V, UL80V laptops

[Svictor]

In my case I couldn't notice any degradation. But I replaced the original HD with a 7200 rpm. The computer boots pretty fast (15 sec maybe), and battery life is ok. But maybe JT and VT differ in that respect

For a dual solution, vgaswitcheroo kinda worked, but you have to restart X to switch between cards. Ironhide proved more interesting for me since it could do the switching in realtime. Its ppa is here: https://launchpad.net/~mj-casalogic/+archive/ironhide/

[christianco]

right you are - no compatibility mode needed - ironhide works good on my ul30vt. thanks.

[mpw]

Hello,

I have an asus ul30vt too and for battery live reasons I decided to only use the intel graphic card. I already managed to automatically disable the nvidia card by adding these three lines to /etc/modules

nvidia_g210m_acpi
acpi_call
blacklist nvidia

After standby I can execute the test_off.sh to decrease the energy consumption again by switching the nvidia off.

But how I run this automatically?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=105

^^This did not work at all

Bye
MPW

[Hobbes]

Anyone feel like testing this stuff with 12.04?

I've been running nvidia through compatibility mode for a while and everything works fine (minus slow start-up and really slow out of sleep mode slow-disk stuff).

I removed nvidia to try out intel in enhanced mode - graphics seem a bit smoother and unity working right away (unlike 11.10 for me)....

However, it is pretty much pointless if I can't disable nvidia card.
**************

Anybody have this working in 12.04? I tried installing the .deb file but got an error during the process. Do you have to compile it yourself now? tried looking through thread but didn't see any obvious recent relevant posts...

A .deb file that 'just worked' would be great... I'd love to get this ul30vt through another year or so (despite some cracked plastic on the hinges and the bezel coming loose from the lcd, it still works alright

Thanks for any help!

[tomsecret]

The following post has been edited, look at the end for my current solution to disable the nvidia geforce 210m on ul30vt
I can confirm that the nvidia card can be switched off on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (32-bit). What I did was download the tarball from http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=34499.

Then I compiled the source using:

wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nv/nvidia-g210m-acpi/nvidia-g210m-acpi.tar.gz
tar -zxvf nvidia-g210m-acpi.tar.gz
cd nvidia-g210m-acpi/
make

Now 'sudo make install' didn't work, so instead I copied the 'nvidia_g210m_acpi.ko' manually. The exact path could be different for you, I used '/lib/modules/3.2.0-24-generic-pae/kernel/drivers/acpi/'

sudo cp nvidia_g210m_acpi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-24-generic-pae/kernel/drivers/acpi/
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe nvidia_g210m_acpi

Now to confirm that the module loaded you can type 'dmesg|grep nvidia' and you should get a line that reads 'kill_nvidia: disabled the discrete graphics card'. Also my power usage decreased from 15-17 W to 10-12 W (at full screen brightness), and the fan stopped running when idle. Hope it works!

Update: You should also consider removing the nvidia driver (sudo apt-get remove nvidia-current). This solved some serious lcd tearing issues I had, as well as making the desktop effects nicer (less pixelated).

Update2: I haven't found out how to load the module nvidia_g210m_acpi at startup. In ubuntu 10.04 I used /etc/rc.local, but if I do that in 12.04 the system hangs during boot. It also hangs if I use /etc/init/rc.conf or /etc/modules. Any other suggestions? At the moment I have to manually start the module ('sudo modprobe nvidia_g210m_acpi').

Update3: For some reason my computer has started crashing during suspend when the module nvidia_g210m_acpi is loaded. This was not a problem the first days after using this module - but now it is, so I guess this solution isn't optimal, and bumblebee (or ironhide) is probably a better alternative.

Update4:
I have now stopped using the module (nvidia_g210m_acpi) since it broke suspend after some time. I've now switched to bumblebee, which seem to work very good. I installed bumblebee according to http://www.bumblebee-project.org/install.html, and then the nvidia card is automatically disabled if you don't want to use it specifically (which is done by launching an application with through the 'optirun' program). Power consumption is similar to loading the nvidia_g210m_acpi, and stays around 10W with screen brightness at 100% and otherwise idle.