I have a Sony VAIO S laptop with the dreaded Optimus and finally managed to get Bumblebee to work fully on Ubuntu 12.04 so that I can utilize both the hardware acceleration of the Intel chipset as well as the Nvidia one via optirun and/or bumble-app-settings.

However, the desktop effects don't work. But they should, I vaguely remember that they worked for a while before I had Bumblebee installed.

This is what I get with the support test:

:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p
Xlib:  extension "NV-GLX" missing on display ":0".
OpenGL vendor string:   Tungsten Graphics, Inc
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Mobile 
OpenGL version string:  1.4 (2.1 Mesa 8.0.2)

Not software rendered:    yes
Not blacklisted:          yes
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  yes
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program:        yes
GL fragment program:      yes
GL vertex buffer object:  no
GL framebuffer object:    yes
GL version is 1.4+:       yes

Unity 3D supported:       no

First of all, I kind of doubt that the chipset doesn't support VBOs (essentially a standard feature in GL).

Neither Xorg.0.log nor Xorg.8.log show any particular errors.

As for the Nvidia drivers: In order to get them to work, I had to install the 304.22 drivers (older ones wouldn't work). They clobbered libglx.so, so I reinstated the xserver-xorg-core libglx.so in its original place, moved Nvidia's libglx.so to an nvidia-specific folder and specified that folder in the bumblebee.config. That seems to work and shouldn't cause the problem I see here.

For fun, I tried to use the Nvidia chipset for Unity, but that didn't fly either:

~$ optirun /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p
OpenGL vendor string:   NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce GT 640M LE/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version string:  4.2.0 NVIDIA 304.22

Not software rendered:    yes
Not blacklisted:          yes
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  no
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program:        yes
GL fragment program:      yes
GL vertex buffer object:  yes
GL framebuffer object:    yes
GL version is 1.4+:       yes

Unity 3D supported:       no