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~

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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.

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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

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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.

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

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