nvidia optimus x11

[moaxcp]

Hello, I have a dell precision m4600. My system has gentoo setup with the notion windows manager. My .xinitrc starts notion and when I run startx everything works.

I have tried installing xdm with the changes described in the nvidia guide here https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Driver_with_Optimus_Laptops and xdm starts up. When I log in the screen goes blank then comes back to the login screen.

I have tried installing slim but I am getting a blank screen. My guess is because the xrandr commands are not getting executed.

Can someone explain how to get either one of these display managers working? For xdm I may have it configured wrong. I thought it would just use whatever I have in .xinitrc but maybe not. For slim I think it just needs the xrandr commands put somewhere but I don't know where. Any help would be awesome!

[audiodef]

The first thing I would try is installing xdm and your dm without any tweaks. If it just works, leave it at that.
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[moaxcp]

Thanks for the reply. I have emerged both slim and xdm with no configuration changes as you said. Both come up with blank screens now. At least with xdm I didn't get a blank screen when I followed the wiki page.

Since xdm is starting and I know the windows manager starts when I use startx do you think I may have xdm configured wrong? It seems like it doesn't execute .xinitrc at all.

[fabalthazar]

Hello,
I see the name of the topic containing "optimus". Perhaps you could be interested in using bumblebee along with bbswitch to be able to switch between the integrated Intel GPU and the discrete Nvidia one.
This works quite out of the box in my Asus Optimus configuration.
Of course, if you want to use only the Nvidia card always on, your way looks correct.

Concerning slim, I use it but AFAIR, it needs a little configuration step otherwise I get a black screen. When I installed my xfce4 DE, I followed this about slim: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xfce/Guide#Graphical_login
Sure it needs to be adapted with your window manager.
Then it is important to update the environment variables:

[moaxcp]

I was able to get xdm working. After setting up xdm to start without a blank screen using this guide. I did the following

• copy /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc
  
• make ~/.xinitrc executable
  
• create ~/.xsession
  
• add export XSESSION=notion to the top of the file
  
• add any other commands you need to execute
  
• add ~/.xinitrc as the final command

After reading the documentation I figured out that xdm doesn't run .xinitrc it runs .xsession. If it is not present it tries to run a some defaults (twm, xterm, xclock, and xsm) because XSESSION was never set. I found an error in .xsession-error stating that xsm was not found. After installing it I could get into the failsafe gui (twm, xterm, xclock, xsm). But setting up notion for my user was tricky.

In .xsession you are expected to set the XSESSION variable and then run .xinitrc. Or you can open the window manager in .xsession. I couldn't figure out how to get .xsession to run /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc without copying it to my home directory. This could be because /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc is not executable.

So now I have a system with xdm and notion. I am using lxpanel in notion to make things look like a standard desktop.