openSUSE Factory Testing and installing NVIDIA prop. driver

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello, so I’m excited that Factory is now a rolling release type and after installing

openSUSE-Factory-NET-x86_64-Snapshot20140728-Media.iso

together with a KDE desktop, all is actually quite stable and nice (love the new look on the installer btw).
So after a discussion on G+ today and a suspend/resume problem, I’ve decided to try installing NVIDIA prop. driver 340.24. And it went surprisingly well actually, in that, didn’t need no patch to compile against kernel 3.16-rc6, all was well. Now the problem I’ve encountered while trying to install was that nouveau didn’t get blacklisted. The NVIDIA installer added a blacklist nouveau.conf file but that was (ignored?) didn’t work. So what I did was reboot, at grub changed to command line and added nouveau.modeset=0 blacklist nouveau at the end of the linux line, then booted and nouveau wasn’t loaded anymore.

So to install NVIDIA prop. driver you need:

  1. Download driver from ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/340.24/ (Save the .run file somewhere), optionally check the md5sum to verify a correct download.
  2. Make sure you have gcc, make, binutils, kernel-source, kernel-devel to compile the kernel module. zypper install should help.
  3. Reboot, add nouveau.modeset=0 to kernel command line in grub menu.
  4. Boot, change to multi-user.target. Login as root in tty2 issue systemctl isolate multi-user.target to change to runlevel 3. No X or graphical mode.
  5. Install NVIDIA driver.
  6. Reboot. ( If nouveau fails to stay blacklisted, even after adding a blacklist.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d run as root mkinitrd ).

With nouveau can’t resume from suspend-to-ram with a working video card? All I get is check signal on my display.

2

New installer you say? Hmm, I guess I’ll have to take a look in a VM.

It’s about time for one though.

Edit:
Oh my goodness, BTFRS default FS and XFS for home? Yikes.

3

You need to rebuild initrd; nouveau is loaded there.

4

This wasn’t the case until now, at least on 13.1, or maybe I was missing something…

5

Can’t say that I’ve had problems with BTRFS (ssd drives) for about a year now. Tried it with openSUSE, Fedora and Archlinux. Also don’t get the xfs for home one though.

6

RPM did it for you …

7

There is no rpm involved when installing the prop. driver manually.

8

I just installed factory, then installed Nvidia driver 304.123, which is working well.

In my case, I added “nomodeset” to the default grub command line in “/etc/default/grub”, and then rebuilt grub.cfg. That stops nouveau from being loaded.

Previously, when installing nvidia drivers the hard way, my experience is:

If the installer finds nouveau is running, it blacklists it and modifies “/etc/sysconfig/kernel” so that


NO_KMS_IN_INITRD="yes"

blocks adding the driver to the initrd. I’m not sure whether this still works now that we are using “dracut” with factory.

If I manually set “nomodeset” for a single boot before I install the nvidia driver, it installs but does not blacklist. Then the nvidia driver won’t always load, unless I use “nomodeset” on the grub default command.

That’s my experience.

9

It would be great if we had nivida/amd factory repo. More people would use the rolling release.

10

I haven’t looked at the legality of it all but in theory you could setup a script on build service that would trigger upon installation of a package, fetch the latest nVidia drivers and compile+install them on your system.

That would get around the problem of not being able to host it on BS itself.

11

You know, that’s not a bad idea. But probably there’s some licence / legality issues in that approach. Even better if it could be included in factory openQA testing.

12

Hey guys, update regarding openSUSE Factory and NVIDIA prop. driver:
After the latest updates to factory which included kernel 3.16-rc7 the NVIDIA driver was all OK, rebuilt with dmks and system rebooted to KDE without a hiccup. So that’s nice.

Mini How to:
After running zypper up (before rebooting). I’ve manually run as root: dkms build -m nvidia -v 320.24 -k 3.16.0-rc7-1-desktop to build the module and dkms install -m nvidia -v 320.24 -k 3.16.0-rc7-1-desktop to have the module installed. Then reboot and openSUSE Factory with KDE came up normally and I was on my way. That’s nice now, with having factory as a rolling release.

13

thank you so much!!! I read your post while in failsafe mode… now I’m up and running with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers

14

Glad you found it useful and managed to work with it. For the future ensure that dkms is enabled (systemctl enable dkms) and after a kernel upgrade, dkms should trigger the kernel modules install automatically and if all is OK things should work properly. (That is kernel upgrade, reboot, dkms starts installing the kernel module, either reboot again or systemctl restart display-manager).

15

done … thanks