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

Red Hat Open House 2012

I was looking forward to date April 5th for quite some time. Red Hat scheduled its Open House for this date.
Event itself was pretty similar, by means of organisation, to previous years. There were lots of presentations related to Open Source, linux and Red Hat of course. Unfortunately I attended only two of them -- Deltacloud and Gnome Shell. The first one was really interesting: talking about cloud technology, cloud API and the product itself, which is API between cloud provider and customer's application.
I was pretty disappointed about Gnome Shell presentation. I expected some advanced information about this "controversial" UI, but presentation itself was based on some well known facts. On the other hand I can imagine that if other viewers wasn't familiar with this shell, they could enjoy the presentation. Presenter showed some really good extensions at least, which I installed immediately after I arrived home, so I have to thank him that my Fedora is more usable now.
I attended Bug Hunt contest for the first time. I have been avoiding it for all these years (because I wasn't good at any scripting language or C/++ at that times) and this time, I just couldn't resist, since I started learning Python. Contest was organised very well. It really impressed me -- but should I wonder? It is Red Hat. The thing which impressed me even more, was that I ended on second place. I earned it just by correcting some python sources and finding some bugs in provided, "bugfull" program.
That's it. This was Red Hat Open House 2012 from my point of view.
Wait.
But there's more!
View from the top of the building was perfect. Chilly breeze was just the thing what I needed. Also buffet was full of tasty yummies, just like every year. I attended server room, which fascinates me more and more every year. Guys answered all of our questions. That gave me really good feeling, how nice and chatty these guys were.
I would like to thank Red Hat for this spectacular event -- awesome as always.