xrandr does not show HDMI at all

Question

I have a laptop (Asus N55SF) with NVIDIA GT555M GPU, with Elementary OS installed (based on Ubuntu). I have Bumblebee installed, with NVIDIA drivers, which works. (optirun glxspheres has higher fps than just glxspheres)

When I connect a display to the VGA adapter, everything works fine. However, when I try to connect a HDMI device, nothing happens. The HDMI port works on Windows 7 and 8, so hardware failure can't be it.

The weird thing is, when I run xrandr, I get the following output:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1920x1080      60.0*+   59.9  
   1680x1050      60.0     59.9  
   1600x1024      60.2  
   1400x1050      60.0  
   1280x1024      60.0  
   1440x900       59.9  
   1280x960       60.0  
   1360x768       59.8     60.0  
   1152x864       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   640x480        59.9  
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

There is no HDMI device listed using xrandr! I searched the web, tried some other drivers, but I really have no clue what to do next.

Someone who might know what the problem is here?

Answer 1

Although this is an old question, the answer will help probably more people. That xrandr does not list your device often signifies a problem with the driver.

Use the hardware lister to check your hardware; sudo lshw -C video

You will find that if there is something wrong with the driver that there is a display, but that it is unclaimed:

*-display UNCLAIMED

The reason why your driver isn't working can be manifold. In my case I used a new (apparently yet unsupported) 4.1.0 kernel and the nvidia-346 driver was silently failing in the Ubuntu GUI. Reinstalling it on the command-line with apt-get showed that the compilation failed to insert the module in the kernel. Rolling back to 3.19.0 solved the problem.

PS: In your case you should've used optirun xrandr. HDMI will not be available if the NVIDIA graphical card is not in use.