Nvidia proprietary drivers and RHEL6

January 20th, 2011 | Tags: , , , ,

Sometimes you need to run Nvidia proprietary drivers in various linux distributions.
I was able to run it on standard RHEL 6.0 installed as “Desktop” with the following commands:

Update the system and install the necessary packages

yum update
yum install gcc kernel-devel
reboot

Blacklist the nouveau driver

sed -i '/root=/s|$| rdblacklist=nouveau vga=791|' /boot/grub/grub.conf
echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Change the initrd image:

mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname  -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Remove the nouveau driver and reboot:

yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nouveau
reboot

Stop the X server and run the Nvidia installation process from command line

init 3
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.29.run
 ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.29.run

Enjoy :-)

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Leave a comment
  1. Jerome Devost
    March 23rd, 2011 at 20:24
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Simple and clear! Thanks!

    Just missing “chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.29.run” after “init 3″.

  2. sophana
    April 5th, 2011 at 09:42
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Thanks!
    I though that only the modprobe.d blacklist would be enough.
    I didn’t know we had to redo the init ramdisk and add a kernel option…

    I installed nvidia graphics from the atrpms repository

  3. Daniel Rodrigue
    April 7th, 2011 at 00:35
    Reply | Quote | #3

    Suggestion: if “yum update” updates your kernel, you must reboot before executing the rest. The reason is “uname -r” will give you the wrong version and your .img file will be wrong, and you won’t be able to boot again (and btw, keeping a copy of the old “nouveau.img” was a smart move to recover that mistake).

  4. Petr Ruzicka
    April 7th, 2011 at 14:05
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Thanks Daniel.

    You are right… I added reboot command after update.

    Regards

    PetrR

  5. Shepard Siegel
    May 20th, 2011 at 16:22
    Reply | Quote | #5

    Thanks Daniel. The recent RHEL6 bump to 2.6.32-135.0.15 made our old process insufficient; and your instructions allowed us to install NVIDIA 275.09 w/o issue.
    -Shep

  6. Shepard Siegel
    May 20th, 2011 at 16:29
    Reply | Quote | #6

    (oops) Thanks Petr! The recent RHEL6.1 bump to 2.6.32-135.0.15 made our old process insufficient; and your instructions allowed us to install NVIDIA 275.09 w/o issue.
    -Shep

  7. TheFunnyOne
    September 12th, 2011 at 18:22
    Reply | Quote | #7

    Thanks Daniel. Worked perfectly!

  8. Rubin
    September 15th, 2011 at 18:37
    Reply | Quote | #8

    Thanks for these steps! They saved the day for me. But now I’ve got another problem as a result. When I try to play a video like a .avi file, I get only audio. I made sure to install all the necessary codecs as mentioned here:
    http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/MultimediaOnCentOS
    But no go.

    I’m using CentOS 6. The problem is not specific to .avi files, I’ve tried other formats and it’s the same. This started only after I installed the Nvidia driver. Any ideas? Also, removing the ‘xorg-x11-drv-nouveau’ package seemed to remove the ‘xorg-x11-drivers’ package as well. Could that have anything to do with it?

  9. Nathan
    October 6th, 2011 at 16:44
    Reply | Quote | #9

    Thank you so much Petr! I had followed another guide for my initial installation of the NVIDIA drivers on RHEL6 and all was well until a kernel update, at which point X wouldn’t start. I followed your guide and it worked like a charm. One thing I’ll say for anyone else having this issue: since I had removed the Nouveau drivers, after the kernel update X couldn’t start. The NVIDIA installer modifies the kernel, so I had to load the new kernel with init 3 enabled, and reinstall the NVIDIA drivers. This reinstall was critical for me, nothing else seemed to work and X would fail to start. Now I am sitting here typing in a browser with the new kernel enabled. :-)

    Thanks again!

  10. Damien
    October 22nd, 2011 at 23:03
    Reply | Quote | #10

    Hello,
    Thanks for the doc :) Unfortunately for me, I have applied it on Scientific Linux 6.1 and after the reboot it appears that nvidia drivers are not loaded. When I launch “Nvidia X Server Settings”, I receive “You don’t appear to be using the Nvidia Xdriver” => run nvidia-config as root. After I run it, X server does not start no more until I remove the created xorg.conf

    Thanks in advance for your help

    Kind regards

    Damien

  11. Al
    November 11th, 2011 at 16:58
    Reply | Quote | #11

    Petr,
    Fantastic instructions. Worked like a charm on my RHEL6.1 box. Many thanks for sharing.

  12. Jaime Gago
    December 21st, 2011 at 01:56
    Reply | Quote | #12

    @Damien
    I’ve installed on RHEL 6.1 and got issues that I was not able to fix using the info on this post (it helped me a lot though). I got the final fix here http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=162114 , I can now go to run level 5 but I still get the Nvidia X Server settings (GUI) to complain with the same error message you get. You might want to check my post on the topic on my blog.