I have been using Linux for past two years, I was never satisfied with the battery life and graphics quality of Linux even though I had i7 processor and Nvidia 540M graphics tried lot of Nvidia Installations either they crashed or they crashed my entire system.Now I tried out bumblebee which works perfectly just like a switchable graphics.
Okay lets Install Bumblebee
- Get rid of all Default driver you already have in your system
sudo apt-get purge xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - Install Bumblebee ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable - Update and Install Bumblebee
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install bumblebee
In case of an error (I got an error related to users addition to group) use these two commands
sudo usermod -a -G bumblebee $USER
sudo apt-get install virtualgl-libs:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libc6:i386
To run application using Nvidia drivers you can use Optirun command in terminal
it takes application name as parameter for example To run Vlc optirun vlc & Firefox optirun firefox &
I was able to achieve a increase of about 1 hour in my battery life. I have also heard that this can decrease the heating in Dell Laptops,but its a fact that we all done a mistake by selecting a optimus laptop for Linux use even after installing bumblebee you wont to be able to use HDMI output and some other functions that windows provide, I'm not sure may be I haven't come across such solutions yet.
You can Install the Bumblebee UI too! https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-ui/blob/master/INSTALL
Reference
1.http://askubuntu.com/questions/163251/how-do-i-install-bumblebee-on-nvidia-540m-in-12-04