How to install Nvidia drivers on openSUSE

Last year around this time, I made a video about installing Nvidia drivers on openSUSE Leap 42. In that video, I followed the “easy way” of installing the drivers which did not require opening a terminal and resulted in somewhat stale drivers being installed.

Today, openSUSE Leap is on version 15 and the Nvidia drivers are as stale as ever. Keep in mind that the openSUSE team does not maintain the repo that the “easy way” uses to install the drivers — Nvidia does. And as such, Nvidia opts to use older but stable drivers instead of the more recent versions of the drivers.

What is “The Hard Way”?

The term “The Hard Way” comes from a page on the excellent openSUSE Wiki. It’s called “The Hard Way” because you have to reboot your system into tty mode to actually install the drivers. For new Linux users, this is a very daunting experience.

For experienced users, this is just another day in Linux-land. Unfortunately, I won’t be posting many pictures of the installation process because capturing screenshots in tty mode is somewhat difficult 😛

What About “The Easy Way”?

The process of installing Nvidia drivers on openSUSE remain the same today as they did in the video I made last year:

1. Enable the Nvidia repo in Yast
2. Refresh your repositories
3. Install the Nvidia driver from Yast or Zypper

And that’s it. No terminals involved (unless you use Zypper), no weird commands to run pre or post install; it’s super easy.

The only problem with the “Easy Way” is that the drivers are pretty old. As of this post, the drivers installed via that Nvidia repo are version
390.87 and do not allow overclocking via coolbits. The latest drivers from Nvidia are version 410.57.

How To Install “The Hard Way”

First, make sure you’ve fully uninstall any existing drivers from Nvidia. This does not include the Nouveau driver; leave that one installed. Next, go to the Nvidia website and download the version of the Nvidia driver you want.

Before we get to the install steps, you’ll need to install all of the driver dependencies manually. Run this command in your terminal: sudo zypper install -t pattern devel_C_C++ devel_kernel

If you don’t want to have to reinstall your drivers each time your kernel updates, I highly recommend you also install dkms: sudo zypper install dkms.

Once you’ve done all of that, follow these steps:

1. Reboot your system to the boot loader
2. Select your openSUSE entry in the boot loader and press “e” to drop into an editor
3. Add “nomodeset 3” to the group “splash=silent quiet showopts”.It should look like this: splash=silent quiet nomodeset 3 showopts
4. Press F10 to boot normally with the addition of the changes in step 3

If the steps above were successful, you should be running in tty/virtual console mode. Log in as your normal user and navigate to the directory where the Nvidia driver installer was saved to. Then:

1. Make the installer executable by running chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_*
2. Run sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86*

The Installer may run a pre-install script that disables the Nouveau driver. If so, the installer will require a reboot before finishing the install. Just follow the previous set of 4 steps and run the installer again.

1. If the installer asks to use dkms press Y and continue.
2. After the install completes, run sudo mkinitrd
3. Once mkinitrd completes, reboot your computer

If everything was successful, you should be running the latest Nvidia drivers! And if you installed dkms, the drivers should be automagically loaded whenever your kernel receives an update!

Something went wrong and my drivers don’t work!

Well, they call this method “The Hard Way” for a reason. I recommend scoping out the openSUSE Wiki to see if there are any updates to this method.

Feel free to leave a comment on this article if you run into trouble also!

Are you planning a video?

No, for two reasons:

1. Capturing footage in tty mode is difficult to say the least
2. I’ve already installed my drivers and I don’t want to uninstall them & reinstall them again. It’s kind of a process.

Summary

There are a lot of nuanced steps here which makes installing Nvidia drivers “The Hard Way” unsuitable for new Linux users. Please do not recommend new users install their drivers this way!

It’s important to note that the Nvidia driver installed via the repo is fine for daily use & gaming. But if you are a power user or want to squeeze the absolute most out of your graphics hardware, you’ll need to opt for the most recent drivers and that’s why the “Hard Way” exists!