Many recent notebooks with a discrete nVidia card in it and an i3/i5/i7 processor use the nVidia Optimus technology to improve battery life. Unfortunately, this software solution is only available in Windows 7 and later. While work is going on in the kernel and drivers to support these notebooks, Bumblebee is a temporary solution allowing you to disable the discrete card if unused and run programs on it if requested.

See also http://askubuntu.com/q/36930/6969

There is a lot confusion of what the difference between MrMEEE/bumblebee (a.k.a. ppa:mj-casalogic/bumblebee), Bumblebee and Ironhide is. A lot people still believe that Ironhide is better than Bumblebee. This is not the case, read http://wiki.Bumblebee-Project.org/History-of-the-project for an extended description of the history.

Our code repositories are hosted at https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project.

Bumblebee 3.0 with improved Power Management has released! https://lists.launchpad.net/hybrid-graphics-linux/msg02091.html

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Team_Bumblebee
Bumblebee aims to provide support for nVidia Optimus Laptops on Linux distributions.