Installing nvidia's proprietary drivers on Fedora 18 (with bumblebee)

I've recently updated my Fedora to release 18. (I'm not gonna say how awesome it is -- it is, but I rather stick to the guide)

The first thing after install I wanted to make my Optimus nvidia card useful -- bumblebee & nvidia's proprietary drivers. Internet is full guides for this task, but unfortunately I couldn't find "the one".

At first I wanted to download latest driver from nvidia's site -- huge mistake. I found nice install script on this site. Everything went well except for the fact that after reboot GUI didn't show up. So I tried to uninstall the driver: it segfaulted. Bummer! Thing to learn from this is if installer tries to create file /etc/X11/xorg.conf you have to delete it (rename is fine also). Fedora does not use xorg.conf to set up X, this just mess up everything. You'll most likely get message in /var/log/Xorg.<\d>.log:

[ 26.891] (EE) No devices detected.
[ 26.891] Fatal server error:
[ 26.891] no screens found

My next option was package kmod-nvidia from RPMFusion. This didn't go well also. X launched, but optirun didn't work (it expected nouveau). Thing to note here is that you should use package for your version of kernel. Otherwise X will complain about fact that it can't find nvidia kernel module.

So what did I do to make it work?

First thing to do is blacklist nouveau and create new initramfs (save old one if something goes wrong):

echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
cd /boot
mv initramfs-$(uname -r).img initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r) --omit-drivers nouveau

Use this awesome repository, which contains bumblebee related packages:

yum install -y http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/itecs/public/bumblebee-nonfree/fedora18/noarch/bumblebee-nonfree-release-1.0-1.noarch.rpm --nogpgcheck
yum install -y VirtualGL bbswitch bumblebee --nogpgcheck

Now is time to install package which contains nvidia's proprietary driver:

yum install -y --nogpgcheck bumblebee-nvidia

Reboot and everything should be fine.

Troubleshooting

If you are stuck in command line after reboot you may try to launch X (and see result & logs):

service gdm start

X-server complains about "no screen found"? Check this command:

xrandr -q

Reference

I didn't make this up just like that. I used these links:

[1] -- awesome tutorial that explains how to install bumblebee on Fedora and how to use it
[2] -- official Fedora guide
[2] -- install bumblebee from sources and configure it
[2] -- information about bumblebee-nvidia package