Linux Misadventures : NVIDIA
I have a confession to make. Even Though Windows 10 was absolutely rock solid for me, I went ahead and installed Linux on my main computer. The flavour of Linux I chose is Fedora.
Just to be frank, this is not my first time using Linux. I’ve been on and off Linux for a while now. The experience was pretty good but my computer doesn’t seem to like Linux very much. It would freeze from time to time. My computer would sometimes flat out refuse to turn on after I’ve put it to sleep. Hopefully, my experience this time would be better. Fingers crossed.
Before I go on further, I would just like to note that this is a first of a series of posts that document my experience using Linux. So non-geeks beware. Moving on.
So my installation of Fedora went smoothly. The installation process was much simpler than the last time. I do regret not taking any screenshots though. It would have been nice to include them here but oh well.
Not long after installation I encountered a problem. My main GPU is an NVIDIA GPU. Linux in particular, Fedora doesn’t play well with NVIDIA. NVIDIA doesn’t open-source their drivers so you have to manually install it. Like any reasonable person would, I use google in an attempt to solve this particular problem. The results were quite disappointing.
Solutions range from just downloading the drivers from NVIDIA to performing a bunch of commands in the terminal that seems very, and i mean very complicated. This seems to be a general trend in the Linux community. Linux is not the product of any one company. It was born from the efforts of many, many programmers. So when a problem arises, you won’t find an authoritative answer to your problem. Instead, you get tons and tons of conflicting advice. This can be quite frustrating but you do get used to it after a while.
Luckily for me, I was able to find the right solution (at least I think it is) to my Nvidia problem. There are 3 steps to solving my NVIDIA issue.
Step 1: Enabling Third Party Repositories
So first, you need to enable third party repositories in the software centre. Luckily, I remember to take screenshots this time.
Step 2: Install the drivers
This part requires you to use the command line. The command line is not as daunting as you might think. It is kinda like a notepad but with super powers.
Just paste these lines into the command line and hit enter on your keyboard. These commands will install the Nvidia driver and then enable cuda on your computer. You may be asked if you want to continue from time to time, just time “y” and hit enter. You’ll also need to enter in your password at least once.
sudo dnf update -y
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
Step 3: Restart your computer
This might seem obvious to most people but oftentimes I forget to restart my computer after installing the NVIDIA drivers. The NVIDIA drivers only work after you restart the computer. Otherwise, the gaming performance is just sub-par.
The End
Well, that is all I have to say for today. See you next time, on my next Linux misadventure.
