What is the right way to install nvidia drivers

General system
1

Hello everyone,
first sorry if this is repeated question. A while ago my endeavouros system broke. That was because the new nvidia 495 drivers don’t support my gpu. I wasn’t able to debug at that time so I jumped to another distro. I am now again using endeavouros. My GPU is NVIDIA GeForce GT 710.
On nvidia’s website it looks like 470 driver series are supported. This is what I did:
I followed this

$ sudo nvidia-installer-dkms --force
# Installs the latest 495 series drivers
$ sudo pacman -Rs nvidia-utils nvidia-dkms nvidia-settings lib32-nvidia-utils
$ yay -S nvidia-470xx-dkms

This seems to be working now. Please could someone confirm this is the right way to do it, means it won’t break after updates to kernel or driver.
Thank you

2

dkms will do exactly that it will rebuild the driver modules against the kernel if kernel gets updated.

But --force is not the way you should use the script, as it does not check if your card is supported by latest drivers.

nvidia-installer-check to check what drivers are supported

nvidia-installer-dkms -t to do a test run without installing it (to see if it works)

sudo nvidia-installer-dkms to install

and if it is a legacy card (first command will give you info about that)
go for:

yay -S nvidia-470xx-utils nvidia-470xx-dkms

the utils is the driver itself

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3

But --force is not the way you should use the script, as it does not check if your card is supported by latest drivers.

I know my gpu doesn’t support the latest drivers. That’s why after running the script I uninstalled the latest drivers and installed

yay -S nvidia-470xx-utils nvidia-470xx-dkms

Is there anything else that needs to be done?
do I need to do these steps that were in the arch wiki?

4

If it works already, then other measures are not needed.

5

alright thank you,
it would be nice if the script would be able to detect older drivers too and install required packages automatically.

6

I don’t get why you install 495, deinstall 495 and install 470. Why not taking the direct route and install 470 right away? No need to use the script then.

7

yes we do currently work on enhancing the script, but it will take some time to get ready, currently the ISO-Release is on top of the list :wink:

And it will need to use AUR directly or find a solution to have the legacy packages on a repository.

1 Like
8

Thats true for sure, but I think people are unsure about what exactly need to be installed, and the script give the info…

9

Your command makes sense with the test -t option. But once one knows they have a legacy card then good to install the legacy.

But this command does not make sense to me

sudo nvidia-installer-dkms --force

@joekamprad post above is the solution…

To deinstall, I use sudo nvidia-installer-dkms -n

Is that correct? Switches to nouveau and reinstall Nvidia.

10

As i say we do currently work on enhancing the script.
It is not needed to install the wrong drivers first… but while doing this the script will enable DRM modesetting for the driver, what is needed for Optimus systems to not boot into black screen.

So the current state of the script is not perfect :wink:

2 Likes
11

uninstall Nvidia :wink:
yes this is still very useful part of the script.

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12

Because that is the process in article on endeavouros site. This is the article I followed.

Workaround for NVidia cards that require 390xx series driver

  • Use nvidia-installer-dkms to install nvidia-dkms (may need to use the --force option)
  • If you get a warning about card is not in our database, then, before rebooting, install nvidia-390xx-dkms from the AUR:
    yay -S nvidia-390xx-dkms

I wanted to install nvidia-470xx-dkms instead. I had to remove the conflicting packages manually.