Installing NVIDIA Drivers on openSUSE 11.0 & other Linux Distrubutions

Saturday, June 7th, 2008 | Fedora Core, SuSE Linux, Techie, Ubuntu / Kubuntu

You listened to many Graphics Card critics and went with an NVIDIA card for your Linux box. But just slapping the card in your machine or installing openSUSE 11.0 will not get you to fully utilize your card. Why? By default most distributions will setup your card using the nv driver which is included in the Xorg installation. So we need to download and install the nvidia driver from nvidia.com.

Now onto my installation. I downloaded the 173.08 Beta version (as I had some issues with the 173.14.05 driver (and when I did get it working it didn’t benchmark to the level the 173 driver did), so I am going to stay with the beta driver for now.

Download the appropriate driver x86 or x64

Switch to runlevel 3 (or init 3) you can do this by running init 3 as root.

Log into runlevel 3 and install the driver
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.08-pkg1.run

Follow the onscreen instructions (really straight forward) and when done switch back to runlevel 5 by running init 5 as root.

Note: You will need the build packages. (ie gcc, kernel-source etc).

This works just fine across distributions like Fedora Core 9, Ubuntu, etc.

UPDATE: There is now a repository you can add for the NVIDIA Drivers. You can setup the repo by running:

sudo zypper ar ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/11.0/ “Nvidia Driver”

Go into YaST –> Software Manager and install the driver that matches your running Kernel.

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7 Comments to Installing NVIDIA Drivers on openSUSE 11.0 & other Linux Distrubutions

Installing NVIDIA Drivers on openSUSE 11.0 & other Linux Distrubutions
June 7, 2008

[...] Eric wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptYou listened to many Graphics Card critics and went with an NVIDIA card for your Linux box. But just slapping the card in your machine or installing openSUSE 11.0 will not get you to fully utilize your card. Why? … [...]

Installing NVIDIA Drivers on openSUSE 11.0 & other Linux Distrubutions
June 7, 2008

[...] Go to the author’s original blog: Installing NVIDIA Drivers on openSUSE 11.0 & other Linux Distrubutions [...]

Rod
June 9, 2008

Did you run sax2 as part of the install? I couldn’t adjust the screen size/position with sax2 as I could with past versions of the driver.

ben.kevan
June 9, 2008

Hi Rod, I did not use sax2. However, to adjust the screen etc correctly (second monitor) you MAY need to check the Activate Dual Head portion within Sax2. If this does not work please feel free to forward me a copy of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and I’ll let you know what I see.

Thanks

rico diaz
October 28, 2008

Hello Ben, I want to ask you some help because i am new in opensuse (linux OS’s), i have installed opensuse11 and I can’t install nvidia driver for my pc. I have downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-177.80-pkg2.run and I can’t make it run. By the way I downloaded it on windows OS because opensuse can’t run my DATACARDGKU modem. Can you give me a step on how to install the driver? thanks in advance.

ben.kevan
October 29, 2008

Hi Rico,

To install change directory (cd) to the location of your NVIDIA installer:

for example
cd /home/rico/download/drivers

here run:
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-177.80-pgk2.run

This should run it, if not please give me the errors. Note you’ll have to install gcc and kernel-source first. To do this run (with dvd in drive or on the internet with access to the repos)

sudo zypper install kernel-source gcc

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