Ben Kevan’s Blog

Installing NVIDIA Drivers on openSUSE 11.0 & other Linux Distrubutions

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.

Tags: drivers, linux, nvidia, opensuse