Ben Kevan’s Blog

NVIDIA 177.82 Linux Drivers Released (openSUSE 11)

New drivers for NVIDIA based cards have been released

Release Highlights
Added support for the following new GPUs:
Quadro NVS 450
Quadro FX 370 LP
Quadro FX 5800
Quadro FX 4800
Quadro FX 470
Quadro CX
Fixed a problem on recent mobile GPUs that caused a power management resume from S3 to take 30+ seconds.
Fixed a problem with hotkey switching on some recent mobile GPUs.
Fixed an image corruption issue seen in FireFox 3.

Download x86 here
Download x86_64 here

To install simply run:
Assuming you’re running x86_64

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-177.82-pkg2.run

You can uninstall the previous version of the nvidia driver by running:

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-177.82-pkg2.run –uninstall

ps. I would give a report on it, but like I said in my posting a few minutes ago.. my Beta 5 box is blah’ed up.. and NVIDIA driver doesn’t seem to be working correctly due to the new kernel.. I suspect it to work fine on openSUSE 11.0 / 11.1 Beta 4 and earlier.

Tags: nvidia, opensuse

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