Debian 9 Issue installing Nvidia drivers on Asus Zenbook

[lyndhurst]

I am starting a new thread after this one http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=134605, because I misidentified the issue I was facing at first, as being related to the installation process, and, as it turns out it is more of a nvidia driver issue.

I already made a few attempts to get the drivers to work, and I will describe what I observed here hoping someone will be able to make sense of it.

To sum it up, after installing debian 9 on my Asus zenbook ux501 I was logging into a frozen system displaying a wallpaper, with no commands available at all. Once in while I would be able to log in into a normal Xfce session, and could not figure out why, but, when I could, the "lspci" command would just hang with no output as well as any attempt to install bumblebee, or nvidia drivers.

My grapic card is Nvidia geforce gtx 960m, with Intel i7 processor.

This page https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Asus/UX501VW allowed me to boot reliably into a functioning system by changing the grub settings as follows:

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=! acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=native"

Now, I can run lspci which outputs:

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lspci -k | grep -iEA5 'vga|3d|display'


00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 (rev 06)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. HD Graphics 530
	Kernel driver in use: i915
	Kernel modules: i915
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 07)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem
--
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] (rev a2)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M]
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau
	Kernel modules: nouveau
02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Alcor Micro Device 6621
	Subsystem: Alcor Micro Device 6621
--
3d:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller
	Kernel driver in use: nvme
	Kernel modules: nvme

It also allowed me to successfully follow all the steps described here https://www.pcsuggest.com/install-and-c ... in-debian/ about how to make optimus work on debian up untill the last command that just hangs for ever:

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service bumblebeed restart

Also note that the first check for nouveau drivers yields expected results, but the second about vga_switcheroo does not output anything..

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sudo modprobe -r nouveau
sudo modprobe -r vga_switcheroo

A forced reboot gets me to a black screen with a block a error messages that I cannot remember as it was a few days ago, but no command available, I could not find any way to interact with the system.
So I did a new clean install..

I do not understand much about "acpi" settings in the grub configuration, but the installation instructions for installing bumblebee on Debian I followed has a troubleshooting section here https://www.pcsuggest.com/nvidia-optimu ... ux-ubuntu/ where they recommend a different grub configuration for acpi_backlight with "=vendor" instead of the "=native" I previously set in order to be able to boot into the xfce session.
Is the problem here? Should I update the grub configuration , and reboot instead of issuing

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service bumblebeed restart

?
I had also previously tried this guide https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers/Optimus with no success.
However, it was before finding out the tips about the grub config that fixed my log in primary issue..
Should I try it again?

I am sorry for the delay between my posts, but I am in the middle of a development project on the windows part of my dual boot, so I do not have a lot of time to make new attempts on this install.

This was a lot of questions, so thank you for your help and attention

[stevepusser]

Your machine will be using the intel GPU for everything after install until you get Bumblebee set up. I guess you have discovered that your Skylake intel GPU also requires the non-free firmware-misc-nonfree; you really should also install the non-free intel-microcode and check to see if you can update your "BiOS" from the manufacturer. All these fix security holes or other bugs.

So what you want to do is get Intel graphics working well before tackling the Nvidia drivers. Trying those with bad Intel graphics won't help at all. If you get Intel working, the next step is to see why the wiki method for installing Bumblebee-nvidia failed for you.