23 Oct 2015

Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 15.10

Nouveau seems to be both difficult to disable and difficult to spell.
I had a little bit of trouble installing official NVIDIA drivers off of the NVIDIA website in my fresh install of Ubuntu 15.10 however, after figuring it out it was actually quite a simple process.
This is a tutorial for if you want to install the latest drivers that NVIDIA offers on the website, otherwise you should just go into "Software & Updates", navigate to the "Additional Drivers" tab, and select the NVIDIA proprietary binary that you would like to use.

Here are the links to NVIDIAs drivers:
NVIDIA drivers: nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
NVIDIA beta drivers: nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx

For the purpose of this tutorial the filename of my binary is:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-358.09.bin
And it will be saved in my Downloads folder in my home directory, which will be represented as either of the following:
~/user/Downloads/
/home/user/Downloads/

The other path you will need to find is: /etc/modprobe.d/
Which will require root privileges to make files in. I'm going to automatically assume you know how to do that as you are installing drivers in a more complicated way to begin with.

In /etc/modprobe.d/ create the file nvidia-driver-disable-nouveau.conf which, if you already tried the run the NVIDIA binary installer, this file will be already created. Inside this file add (or write over the top of):
# generated by nvidia-installer
blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off
The first line is not necessary, it is just a comment, and if you did have this file already created by nvidia-installer some of these lines will already be in there.

(Other tutorials talk about creating a file called nouveau-kms.conf and adding the line:
options nouveau modeset=0
maybe this is all that needs to be done.)

Now the important step to get this to actually register, open terminal (ctrl+alt+t) and enter the following:
sudo update-initramfs -u
This will then prompt you for your password.

Next step: REBOOT

Once rebooted (no need to log in), switch to an alternate virtual desktop with the key combo ctrl+alt+F5 enter your user-name and password.
Enter the following:
sudo service lightdm stop
Enter your password, then tailor this last step to your file is saved and its filename.
cd ./Downloads
sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-358.09.run
You could type the file name as ./NV* and provided no other files are in your directory that start with "NV" it should run the file.

One final note, if you want your drivers to install themselves every time you get a new kernal update you should install DKMS anytime before running the binary driver install.
sudo apt-get install dkms

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