Tuesday, August 6, 2013

nVidia Drivers for Fedora Linux 19 64-bit

To keep myself from searching every time I install or re-install Fedora 19 64-bit I made a little cheat sheet. Below are the steps I use to install the nVidia Drivers for my GeForce 660 Ti. This should work with most other nVidia cards which are of the 8xxx variety or newer (maybe others too but the oldest I've tested is a 8800).

First you'll need to make sure you have the RPMFusion repository enabled. To do so use the below command (1 long command)

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

then you'll want to fully update your system and reboot when it's finished (2 commands, 1 on each line). You might want to bookmark this page so you can come back and get the final few commands :)

sudo yum upgrade
sudo reboot -n

next command... the magic happens. In addition to the graphics driver the 32-bit OpenGL libraries are installed so most my games work. (1 long command)

sudo yum install akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs vdpauinfo libva-vdpau-driver libva-utils xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686 kernel-devel

After the drivers install reboot your system one final time.

sudo reboot -n

The above pretty much sums up how I install my graphic card drivers. It may look like a lot of crap to go through but it's not that bad. And more importantly, it works.


4 comments:

  1. Hi Jeremy, I am not sure if you got my last message so I am posting another one. I installed Fedora for the first time and followed your instructions to a T but was unable to start X. I am switching from Ubuntu where they have proprietary software designed for Nvidia but Fedora does not. Would you be available to help me figure out my issue after? I am sure tons of new people coming to this site would really appreciate it as well.

    Thanks, Cheers!

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  2. Hello there! After seeing your reply I figured i'd verify the commands work, so I did a fresh install of Fedora 19 and installed video drivers using the same method as outlined above. Everything seemed to be working as it should.

    I can't say what might be happening to cause your X not to start up. All I can think of is sometimes the kernel is updated and the packages from RPMFusion for the kernel modules isn't updated yet. You can also try using kmod instead of akmod in the installation command. It should look something like this.

    sudo yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs vdpauinfo libva-vdpau-driver libva-utils xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686

    If that doesn't help I am stumped. Good Luck. I'll let you know if I come up with anything else.

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  3. This guide also works on what will be Fedora 20.

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  4. Added one more dependency for installation. The kernel-devel package is needed to compile the kernel module.

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