Disconnecting a discrete video card in Ubuntu on the example of Acer Timeline 3810TG

Good all the time of day!
Recently, going to Habr found as many as two reviews of Acer Timeline laptops. I myself am the proud owner of a 13.3 "model from this line, which prompted me to develop this theme. The fact is that for work I prefer to use Ubuntu, which I installed on the second day after buying a laptop. Earlier, I dealt with my Ubuntu Acer aspire one, on which everything worked out for me “out of the box.” In this case, everything was not so rosy.

The essence of the problem

I must say right away that I had to forget about the stated eight hours of work, because in many respects this time of work is achieved by the software of Windows 7. He refused to work for more than three and a half hours. But here I was alerted by the temperature of the case. In Ubuntu, the laptop was warmed up by two times, or even three more than in Windows. After some searching for the cause, I discovered that Ubuntu can neither switch video cards “on the go” nor disable one of them. Those. Both video cards built into these laptops (and many more laptops with two video cards) will be powered on simultaneously, wasting so much energy. Since I was not going to play games under Ubuntoy, I decided to remove the unnecessary ATI video card from the system. After reading the relevant forums I found the script 'lenovo_acpi', written for Lenovo laptops with a similar problem. This script, without a single modification, solved my problem, which means it could be useful to other owners of the Timelines as well.

Proceed to install

First you need to download the rpm package from this link. To use it in Ubuntu, you must install dkms and alien. Install:

sudo apt-get install dkms alien

Then in the directory with the previously downloaded package execute the following commands:
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sudo alien --script lenovo_acpi-0.1.0-1DKMS.noarch.rpm
sudo dpkg -i lenovo-acpi_0.1.0-2_all.deb

You can check the module as follows:

sudo modprobe lenovo_acpi

If you want the module to load every time you start the system, simply add 'lenovo_acpi' without quotes from the new line in / etc / modules.
It is also worth mentioning that the “Switchable” graphics mode must be set in the BIOS settings, and I also note that this method was personally checked by me only on Ubuntu 10.04.

Afterword

After installing this module, powertop began to show more pleasant numbers - about 5 hours of work with wi-fi on in power saving mode. There are other methods of saving battery power, which you can read about in this thread at the ubuntuforum.
I hope this article will be useful. I would also like to thank Comrade. loll31 which assembled this package for easier installation under Ubuntu.