NVidia drivers: RPMFusion vs. ELRepo

Hi,

I’m currently fiddling with Rocky Linux as a base system for a bells-and-whistles workstation. The PC has an NVidia GeForce GT 710 video card. I’ve been using RHEL clones since CentOS 4.x, so I have some experience in setting up this kind of video card.

Under Rocky Linux 8.x I’m using - among other repos - the RPMFusion and the ELRepo repositories. Now I notice that both of these provide binary NVidia drivers.

Any recommendations on which ones to use ?

Thanks & cheers from the sunny South of France,

Niki

I know Nvidia marks it as CUDA, but even if you aren’t using CUDA they provide official Rocky drivers (and you don’t have to install CUDA if you don’t want it):

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/rhel8/x86_64/cuda-rhel8.repo
sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf -y module install nvidia-driver:latest-dkms
sudo dnf -y install cuda

That’s one way of getting the official NVidia drivers. I only use NVidia provided RPMs and can’t speak to the other repos.

Hope this helps.
~Stack~

Using elrepo or rpmfusion should be sufficient. I generally recommend the use of elrepo for the nvidia driver.

I would personally avoid the nvidia driver site directly as they take sometimes too long to update their drivers for a kernel release (on top of their spec files being configured poorly - there was a case we had to reissue a kernel and their driver stopped working entirely - this doesn’t happen with elrepo’s drivers). Please see our starter post for other information.

Thanks guys. Guess I’ll be using ELRepo then. The more so since I’ve got some obsolete hardware here, a series of old Apple iMacs with Geforce 9400 cards that only work with the 340.xx driver. I know it’s obsolete, but it’s the only option to install an OS on these machines.

Cheers,

Niki

I also have a GT710. I’m using rpmfusion’s driver, but that was more or less happenstance. Putting this here for people who come upon it with a web search, the GT710 requires the nvidia-470xx set of drivers.

And if you are unsure about which nvidia driver is required for your device, use the nvidia-detect package from ELRepo. For details see: