Nvidia drivers

If you need to install the NVIDIA drivers in your linux box you can encounter several problems.
Here I try to summarize some useful step.

First of all try to install the distribution packages, likely something like:

• libcublas4 - NVIDIA CUDA BLAS runtime library
• libcudart4 - NVIDIA CUDA runtime library
• libcufft4 - NVIDIA CUDA FFT runtime library
• libcurand4 - NVIDIA CUDA Random Numbers Generation runt
• libcusparse4 - NVIDIA CUDA Sparse Matrix runtime library
• nvidia-common - Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
• nvidia-compute-profiler - NVIDIA Compute Visual Profiler
• nvidia-cuda-dev - NVIDIA CUDA development files
• nvidia-cuda-doc - NVIDIA CUDA and OpenCL documentation
• nvidia-cuda-gdb - NVIDIA CUDA GDB
• nvidia-cuda-toolkit - NVIDIA CUDA toolkit
• nvidia-current - Transitional package for nvidia-current
• nvidia-current-updates - Transitional package for nvidia-current-up
• nvidia-opencl-dev - NVIDIA OpenCL development files
• nvidia-settings - Transitional package for nvidia-settings
• nvidia-settings-updates - Transitional package for nvidia-settings-u
  

If this fails, ty remove all the installed packages and driver and install that from the NVIDIA site:

• Download the NVIDIA drivers and the latest CUDA installers

• stop the X server with

  sudo service lightdm stop
  

• find them with

  aptitude search '~i' | grep "nvidia\|cuda\|libcu" | grep -v "kwin\|cups\|curl"
  

  and check they are the installed packages and there are no other packages

• remove them with

  sudo aptitude --purge <packages names>
  

• blacklist all the modules that can interfere:

1. in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf insert

   blacklist amd76x_edac
   blacklist vga16fb
   blacklist nouveau
   blacklist lbm-nouveau
   blacklist rivafb
   blacklist nvidiafb
   blacklist rivatv
   

2. in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf insert

   blacklist nouveau
   options nouveau modeset=0
   blacklist lbm-nouveau
   alias nouveau off
   alias lbm-nouveau off
   

3. in /etc/default/grub insert

   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"
   

4. then run

   sudo update-grub
   sudo update-initramfs -u
   

• see also here

• install the drivers and then CUDA running the installers and following the instructions

• in /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf the NVIDIA installer should insert

  blacklist nouveau
  options nouveau modeset=0
  

• install some more libs

  sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev libxi-dev libxmu-dev
  

• reboot