Fedora, the operating system of RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) does not have pre-installed exclusive Nvidia drivers in it for the users. Although it does have default Nouveau drivers which work in most conditions, you may face some problems while using them. If you encounter issues while using the Nouveau drivers you will have to install the official proprietary Nvidia drivers.
The official Nvidia drivers can help you get the most out of your GPU by enhancing its performance. In this article, we will learn to install the official Nvidia drivers on Fedora
However, before we start with the installation process, we need to do system configuration. The first configuration we need to do is stop the GUI from running and the second step is to disable the default nouveau drivers. From the GRUB boot menu, it is really easy and doable.
How to Install NVIDIA Drivers on Fedora via RPM Fusion
First of all, make sure that your system is fully updated by running the following command:
sudo dnf update
Next, run the following command to identify your graphics card:
lspci -vnn | grep VGA
Now enable the RPM Fusion repository by running the below-given commands:
sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpmsudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
These commands will enable both the free release and non-free release repositories.
Now the last step is to install the relevant drivers according to your graphic card:
- For the most recent GeForce:
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia - For Legacy GeForce 400/500:
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-390xx akmod-nvidia-390xx - For Legacy GeForce 8/9/200/300:
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx akmod-nvidia-340xx
Reboot the system once the drivers have been successfully installed:
sudo reboot
The system should work perfectly now.
How to Install Nvidia Drivers manually on Fedora
To manually install Nvidia drivers on our system we first need to identify our Nvidia graphics card by running this command:
lspci -vnn | grep VGA
Now Visit the official website for NVIDIA drivers and download the drivers which are most compatible with your hardware using the search criteria
If you already know which drivers you need for your system then just visit this URL and download the required driver package.
Next, we will install the newly downloaded drivers package but first, we need to install a few prerequisites which are essential for the successful setup and compilation of Nvidia drivers on Fedora.
sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"sudo dnf install libglvnd-devel
After successful installation of prerequisites, now we need to disable the nouveau driver:
sudo grub2-editenv - set "$(sudo grub2-editenv - list | grep kernelopts) nouveau.modeset=0"
The command given above will modify the GRUB boot menu and permanently disable the nouveau driver.
Now restart the system:
sudo reboot
After the reboot, the system may misbehave. It may even start running without a GUI. Therefore it is recommended to enable an SSH server on your system so you can access it remotely.
To install our drivers we will switch to the text mode from GUI mode by running this command:
sudo systemctl isolate multi-user.target
Everything has been setup and now you can finally install the drivers on your system:
sudo bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-* -y
After successful installation, reboot your system to let the changes take effect:
sudo reboot
Now run this final command to get your system back into its normal state:
sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind
For any further configuration of your Nvidia drivers use the following command:
sudo nvidia-settings
Conclusion
Nvidia graphic cards are very useful for any rendering work that you might want to do on your system. They are used in gaming, graphics production, ray tracing, and mining cryptocurrency. To get the most out of Nvidia graphics cards and improve the computational power of a system, compatible Nvidia drivers must be installed
In this guide we learned to install, and set up Nvidia drivers on Fedora by two different methods.