Solved How do you install Nvidia driver on GNOME?

[CaffeineAddict]

GNOME runs on wayland by default, they seemingly dumped xorg completely, there's even no options on login screen to choose X11 session, I'm fine with that, however installing Nvidia driver fails to start wayland session, during boot it freezes and it doesn't even start display manager.
During installation of the driver it complains something about xorg installation path can't be found and that the driver install path was guessed, I can continue installing but this doesn't work

I don't want to install driver from debian's repo because it's too old.

Any GNOME users here who manually install Nvidia driver from nvidia.com?

 

[f33dm3bits]

Nvidia has an official repo for their Nvidia drivers.

Index of /compute/cuda/repos

They have one for Debian 12 but not yet for Debian 13.

Index of /compute/cuda/repos/debian12

You could try installing the 580 driver from there since it's newer than what ships with Debian 13.

https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/debian12/x86_64/nvidia-driver_580.65.06-1_amd64.deb

You could also try installing the driver with a headless option: --no-opengl-files --no-x-check --disable-nouveau extentions

Headless Remote Server Setup

So I installed the Nvidia drivers using --no-opengl-files --no-x-check --disable-nouveau extentions and didn’t allow Nvidia to to run the xsettings towards the end. I now get glxgears/glxinfo through the ssh -X window and can get my visualization software to run however it refuses to use the...

forums.developer.nvidia.com

But that info is from 2017 so chances are that might not work anymore.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

I'm downloading drivers from here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/linux-amd64-display-archive/
For reference which to download I use: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/current-graphics-driver-releases/28500

Latest feature driver is 575.64.05 which works fine in Trixie on KDE Plasma 6 desktop, so neither the driver nor Trixie are to blame, problem is that GNOME dumped X11 session and now driver doesn't work.

You could try installing the 580 driver from there since it's newer than what ships with Debian 13.

That's beta driver, I'll try it as last resort, in the mean time I've found this article:

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide

It suggests to set fbdev=0 which normally isn't required so I'll try that first and let you know.

 

[Brickwizard]

problem is that GNOME dumped X11 session and now driver doesn't work.

have you read....... https://discourse.gnome.org/t/switc...to-xorg-x11-on-linux-ubuntu-22-04-2-lts/16302

 

[f33dm3bits]

It suggests to set fbdev=0 which normally isn't required so I'll try that first and let you know.

I also used to set these but don't think they are needed anymore.

nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1

 

[f33dm3bits]

Using these flags didn't work?

--no-x-check --no-opengl-files --disable-nouveau --dkms -s

 

[CaffeineAddict]

have you read....... https://discourse.gnome.org/t/switc...to-xorg-x11-on-linux-ubuntu-22-04-2-lts/16302

I was hoping to keep wayland enabled, so that's another thing to try out, thanks.
But I was reading this:

X11 Session Removal FAQ

Here is a quick series of frequently asked questions about the X11 session kissing us goodbye. Shoutout to Nate from which I copied the format of the post. Is Xorg unmaintained and abandoned? No, the Xorg Server is still very much maintained, however its feature development is halted. It still...

blogs.gnome.org

I also used to set these but don't think they are needed anymore.

nvidia_drm.modeset=1 is required for wayland to work, without this you can't go past the display manager.

Using these flags didn't work?

Didn't try yet, the forum answer suggests against them, --no-opengl-files would switch to software rendering which I don't want for games, --no-x-check is worth trying and DKMS is no for me.

I'll now go experiment with advices so far and see if anything works, hopefully I don't brick OS.

 

[f33dm3bits]

nvidia_drm.modeset=1 is required for wayland to work, without this you can't go past the display manager.

Not on Arch Linux, it's default since the 560 driver.

NVIDIA - ArchWiki

I dont' have it set and it does get me to the display manager.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

OK, this time it worked, however I'm not 100% certain why because did 2 things:

1. Set options nvidia-drm modeset=1 fbdev=0 while installing driver in text mode
2. Set options nvidia-drm modeset=1 fbdev=1 before rebooting into graphical mode
3. The actual bug seems to be that Nvidia driver didn't update initramfs so I also did sudo update-initramfs -u before rebooting to graphical mode. (normally it does that automatically)

I'm almost certain the problem was point 3 because unblocking nouveau driver from live USB made graphical session work which suggests that Nvidia driver was not inserted into initramfs because initramfs wasn't updated by installer.

 

[MikeWalsh]

Without a shadow of a doubt, it's not Nvidia's fault. Their drivers work as well as they ever did.....but with the Linux eco-system steadily transitioning to Wayland-only, methinks they're going to have to have a re-think, and do some serious re-writing of the code for their Linux drivers.

For me, it's not such an issue. I run an unsupported card, but no way am I going to dash out & drop a ton of cash (that I can't spare) SIMPLY to be able to use a "supported" driver. The old GT 710 runs both 32- and 64-bit on the final supported drivers for that architecture (390xxx for 32-bit, 470xxx for 64-bit). Everything's tickety-boo, and with our Pup's ability to let a session evaporate if you don't want to save it, I'm not that bothered about "security" OR newer "feature-sets" anyway.

And some of my Pups, I can't be bothered with the official drivers.....and let them run with 'nouveau'. Everything's serene....

I'm happy as I am.


Mike.