During an interview, in Finland Linus Torvalds the man behind the exceptional idea of Linux and git source code management, gave his ‘Middle Finger Salute‘ to NVIDIA in frustration with the support provided by the company for the Linux platform.
Torvalds is depressed with the fact that NVIDIA is not supporting Linux, enough. It gets even more worse with the truth that NVIDIA is getting hot with every passing day in Android based mobile handset market which literally means that NVIDIA is not supporting Linux.
Fixed a build failure, 'too many arguments to function 'getuserpages', when building the NVIDIA kernel module for Linux kernel v4.4.168. Fixed a build failure, 'implicit declaration of function dogettimeofday', when building the NVIDIA kernel module for Linux kernel 5.0 release candidates. Installing NVIDIA drivers on Arch Linux is quite simple and easy. Open a terminal & run this command: sudo pacman -S nvidia. After completing, run the following command to install the latest 32-bit version of the driver (IMPORTANT for playing Steam games). NVIDIA nForce Drivers Open source drivers for NVIDIA nForce hardware are included in the standard Linux kernel and leading Linux distributions. This page includes information on open source drivers, and driver disks for older Linux distributions including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux. Those pesky NVIDIA Linux drivers. I forgot how annoyingly difficult they can be to work with in Linux sometimes. Unfortunately, notebooks with the Optimus GPU setup are even more painful. To use with NVIDIA ® Tegra ® Linux Driver Package (L4T), you can manually configure and setup the software drivers before use or allow JetPack to perform the standard setup. Consult your board documentation for guidance on manually setting up and configuring your reference board. If you have NVIDIA graphic card like GTX 1080 and you want to do something cool with the card you will need latest drivers. In order to install latest driver you have two ways: using Ubuntu default repository or download drivers from Ubuntu site.
The outburst of anger and frustration was the result of the question asked by a Linux user. The question was ‘Optimus‘ feature of NVIDIA which lets the user to switch On/Off Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to save power came late for Linux, as compared to other Operating Systems. NVIDIA was very much clear when asked about this, and clearly stated that NVIDIA is not going to support Linux to the point, Windows and Mac would get.
This issue of NVIDIA is not new and the users have been complaining for years regarding this. The Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has tried to fill this with its own open source driver. NVIDIA refused to release Open Source driver saying that it can not make critical informations publicly available.
On the other hand, the act of Linus Torvalds of showing middle finger on camera was criticized, some said that it does not suit an intellectual like him, other said it was not professional at all, while some said that even Torvalds is a human and it was just an outburst.
Most of the today’s distro comes with an open source NVIDIA alternative called ‘Nouveau‘. Nouveau render graphics perfectly, however it lacks 3D support. Hence to Install Proprietary NVIDIA driver. Nouveau must be stopped from starting automatically, which we will be calling as blacklisting throughout the article.
Installation of NVIDIA Drivers in RHEL/CentOS and Fedora
First, install needed “Development” packages using YUM command as shown.
Before installing NVIDIA drivers, you need to know your driver product type by using following command.
Sample Output
Once you know your driver name, then go to NVIDIA official website and download required drivers for your system. Download drivers using following link.
Disable Nouveau Driver
open “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf” in your favourite editor and add “blacklist nouveau”, ofcourse without double-quotes.
Next create a new “initramfs” file and taking backup of existing.
Reboot the machine. Login into command mode using Alt+F4 / ALT+F5 as root.
Once you in command line mode, next go to the folder where you’ve downloaded NVIDIA driver and run the script as show. If any dependency, you need to Yum the required packages.
Once installation is complete, generate xorg.conf file using following command.
Copy xorg.conf.new as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Now switch to X Window as root user by typing.
Launch NVIDIA configuration window and set the Resolution, manually, and at last click on ‘Save to X Configuration File‘ and quit. For reference, follow the screen shot added below.
Installation of NVIDIA Drivers Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint
First, check the information about your supported Graphics Card by issuing following command.
Sample Output
Next add a repository under “/etc/apt/sources.list” file at the bottom. Save and close it.
Disable Nouveau Driver
Open “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf” file and add the following line. Save and close the file.
Next, do a system update and then install NVIDIA drivers and required Kernel packages using “apt-get” command.
Stop the X service (gdm3).
Generate new xorg.conf file using following command.
Copy xorg.conf.new as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Now switch to X Window as root user by typing.
Open NVIDIA configuration wizard and set the Resolution, manually, and at last click on ‘Save to X Configuration File‘ and quit.
NVIDIA Driver Settings
Congrats! Your installation and configuration of NVIDIA Graphics Driver is complete.
That’s all for now, If you gets stuck at a place during installation and could not fix it yourself, you can always ask for guidance in comment section. Do a favor for us by sharing the article.
If you have an Nvidia video card you’re in luck. They perform exceptionally well on the Linux platform. However, most Linux-based operating systems come with the open-source driver preinstalled. The performance is poor, and 3D capabilities are usually non-existent. To get the most out of your video card, you need to install Nvidia’s proprietary driver.
Install Recommended Nvidia Driver
This will install a fairly recent driver, but not the absolute latest. If you want bleeding edge software, skip to the next section.
The advantages of following the procedure in this section are:
- Older video cards (4+ years) may not work with the latest driver. The utility will automatically find and recommend an older driver (if necessary) that still works with your card.
- These drivers are tested more and have fewer bugs than bleeding edge drivers.
- It’s the easiest way to install a proprietary driver.
- In most cases, performance is top notch.
If your card is already two years old or more, it’s better to go with the recommended driver. Developers already had a few years to improve software for your card. Newer releases usually deal with removing bugs and improving performance on newer cards.
On the flipside, if your card is extremely new, you may have a lot to gain by using the most recent driver.
Related: AMD vs. Nvidia GPUs: Who’s Winning the 2018 Graphics War?
To proceed, press the Super key. On most keyboards, this is the key with the Windows logo on it. Type “software” and click on the “Software & Updates” utility. Its icon is a cardboard box with a flat globe on it (the first icon in the next picture).
In the top bar go to the “Additional Drivers” tab. In most cases the Nouveau open-source driver is preselected here. Click on “Using NVIDIA driver metapackage …” to switch to the proprietary driver. Next, click “Apply Changes,” and wait for the driver to install.
Reboot and enjoy the high performance driver which will let you use the full capabilities of your card.
Related: How to Manage Nvidia Optimus Chipsets in Ubuntu with Bumblebee
Install the Latest Nvidia Driver
You have a very recent card, launched just a few months ago. In this case you don’t want to wait until Ubuntu includes a better driver in their main repositories. To get the most recent software for your card, you can use a third-party repository.
Open a terminal emulator and enter the following command:
Update the package repository information.
Upgrade all packages on your system. Even if you know you have your system up to date, don’t skip this step. It is important and helps avoid some scenarios where packages from the PPA can conflict with other packages.
Find out what proprietary driver packages are available.
Install the latest, the one with the highest version number at the end. For example, in the previous picture “nvidia-driver-415” is the latest. Replace the name of this package in the next command, with what is the latest in your case.
Nvidia Drivers Linux Mint
Reboot your computer so that the new driver is loaded.
Upgrading Your Nvidia Driver
Periodically, new packages will be released with newer Nvidia drivers.
Important: before upgrading the driver, you should always perform a general system upgrade first with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade.
Without following this step, you may get conflicts between older and newer packages from the PPA.
It’s worth mentioning that you can also use “Software & Updates” to upgrade your driver. It’s easier to use a program with a graphical user interface. However, it does come at a price. If there is a problem with installing the driver, you can’t see what the error is.
To upgrade the driver from the terminal, first list available drivers:
If a newer driver is available than what you have installed, upgrade to it with:
Replace VERSION_NUMBER_HERE with the latest version number you saw in the output of the previous command.
How to Purge Nvidia Driver
In some cases you may get package conflicts which may be hard to solve manually. You can purge all Nvidia packages (and related) from your system with:
Reboot and then try your preferred method of installing an Nvidia driver (recommended, latest, from terminal or from “Software & Updates”).
Ubuntu 18.04 Install Nvidia Driver
Conclusion
Performance of the closed-source, proprietary driver is miles away from the open-source one. In fact, with most of the modern cards and drivers, you will usually get between 90% and 100% of the performance you have on Windows. And with Steam’s Proton compatibility layer, that lets you play Windows games on Linux, and there’s plenty to enjoy.