Bumblebee 3.0 Released (Nvidia Optimus GPU Switching For Linux)

Nvidia Optimus is a technology available for notebooks, used to increases battery life by switching the dedicated GPU off when it's not needed and then switching it on again when it's needed. When the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip is used.

Nvidia Optimus GPU switching is officially only supported on Windows 7, but it's also unofficially available on Linux thanks to the Bumblebee project.

Bumblebee 3.0 "Tumbleweed" has been released yesterday - here are the release highlights:

• Server / client re-written in C which provides increased performance and reliability
• Automatic power management which also survives suspend
• Improved error detection and reporting
• Better system integration
• Switch to Upstart startup mechanism
• acpi_call has been replaced with bbswitch and vga_switcheroo
• Nouveau support for the Ubuntu PPA package
• "optirun --status" will now show the current status of Bumblebee and the secondary GPU on your system
• Xorg configuration greatly simplified, provided defaults usually work out of the box.

The complete  changelog can be found here.


Please note that I do not own a Nvidia Optimus powered device so I couldn't test this!

To install Bumblebee 3.0 "Tumbleweed", see the Bumblebee installation wiki page (instructions for Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu - PPA included, and installation from source). Oh, and to use it, you obviously need a Nvidia Optimus powered notebook.

via Linux Hybrid Graphics

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Ubuntu Control Center 0.6.1 Released

Ubuntu Control Center (UCC) is an unofficial application inspired by Mandriva Control Center, designed to bring simplicity and a less cluttered interface (because a lot of applications add themselves to the GNOME Control Center automatically) to manage the Ubuntu system settings for the simple user.

Besides being an application you can use to launch various system settings, UCC also lets you switch between low and high performance graphics cards (if you have a netbook with 2 GPUs) which is possible starting with Linux Kernel 2.6.35.

After quite some time, a new Ubuntu Control Center version was released which brings a new module that displays some basic system hardware info, integrated Y PPA Manager (to manage PPAs), Gnome-Lirc (for configuring IR devices), Nanny (parental control) and Font-Manager was removed.

The new version also doesn't automatically install the applications you can launch from its interface as dependencies so you don't have to use all of them if you don't want to ("sudo apt-get install hardinfo bum startupmanager nanny gufw gparted deja-dup" will install most of them; also see this for installing Y PPA Manager).

Download Ubuntu Control Center (the page is in Portuguese, but scroll down and you should see the download links)

Thanks to Benjamim Gois for the tip!

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