Hi KHarvey!
Concerning my active help, the only issue is that I know this distribution since 5 days. I am a tc illiterate!
On the other hand I have here an optimus perfectly equipped with suse, it belongs to my wife, and I can use it of course for tc installation purposes. As additional issue, I was hoping in a quiet rest time for my brain but i see the stars decided differently.
Assuming we will do this work together, i start talking more precisely. i consider optimus a big progress in the laptop technology: dramatic reduction in power consumption, the machine has a lot of power and great graphic. the production costs are lower and the price is also much more reasonable. The battery life increases also dramatically. ok, but HOW IT WORKS?
The laptop has 2 graphic cards, intel and nvidia, so, both drivers are required! The two cards are "married" together. the intel card has no 3d accel., but borrows partially this power from the nvidia card without starting the strongly power consuming nvidia gpu. the intel card borrows just what you need for compiz, a pinguin race or my great chessmaster. if required, $$ndows switches automatically, starts the powerful nvidia gpu and provides a huge amount of 3d accel. under linux that must be done manually by starting the consuming application with the prefix "optirun", ex. "optirun vlc". of course vlc doesn't requires to be started in optirun! finally, i can assure you that bumbleweed works 100%.
THE PROBLEM:
To make this wonder possible, the kernel must provide the same buffer for both cards. the intel driver is opensource, the nvidia one is proprietary. and now the legal problem: nvidia exiges a legal proprietary coverage for such a buffer. the kernel programmers advise that nvidia should finally make open source drivers, the kernel is entirely gpl and they will never change the legal status of the linux kernel, even partially.
On the other side, we, common people, are needing the linux modules for our optima laptops. For this reason our ubuntu heroes are reverse engineering the nvidia releases and use the code to build linux versions. Graciously nvidia ignores this professional hacking operation of and here we are!
OUR WORK:
- 1) install first the intel drivers
- 2) only after that install the nvidia drivers, not so simple but i have a couple of ideas!
- 3) install the compiler and backup the installation
- 4) compile the source, possibly from the ubuntu repo. we will need to try different versions
- 5) done!!!
I think we will land quite often on level 3, but we can make a liberal use of mc to delete extensions
I will start on saturday / sonday.
is that OK?