Debian: nvidia display card driver install

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Bumblebee aims to provide support for NVIDIA Optimus laptops for GNU/Linux distributions(Bumblebee porject, Debian wiki). It can help to solve the overheat problem caused by dual dispaly card, also provide a easy way to install nvidia close source driver as well.

Update your source.list

To install nvidia close source driver, you need to add contrib non-free at every “main” item in your source.list:

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sudo sed -i.bak 's/stretch[^ ]* main$/& contrib non-free/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

This command will help you to do that meanwhile create a .bak file to backup your origin source.list.
Don’t forget to do apt update after that:

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sudo apt update

Install Bumblebee

If you have installed nvidia driver before, you should remove them to continue:

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sudo apt-get remove nvidia*

Then you can start to install bumblebee now:

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sudo apt install bumblebee-nvidia primus

Don’t worry about nouveau driver, bumblebee will help you to handle it.
Then we need to add your user account to bumlebee group:

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sudo adduser $USER bumlebee

After that you might need to restart your computer. Application will use your intel card by default. If you want some application use your nvidia card, use

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optirun $(YOURAPP)

Verify your driver

A easy way to verify this is to use glxspheres. It’s a part of virtualgl project. glxgears is not recommended because it’s not a tool for benchmarking.
We can use Intel display card to run it first:

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vblank_mode=0 /opt/VirtualGL/bin/glxspheres64

vblank_mode=0 will temporarily disable vertical synchronization. If you don’t add it, you might only can get 60 fps which is same as your monitor refresh rate. The result I got:

Then run it with nvidia card:

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vblank_mode=0 optirun /opt/VirtualGL/bin/glxspheres64

It’s much faster than Intel card.