Yesterday, I did a fresh install of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my NVidia-powered machine (GeForce GTX 1060 6gb). When installing, I enabled Secure Boot.
By default, the distribution comes with nouveau drivers, and the process of installing official NVidia drivers is outlined here: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers
I successfully added openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed-NVIDIA as per the guide; first oddity is that by default it shipped with openSUSE-repos-MicroOS-NVIDIA, which got uninstalled as a conflicting package, despite this being Tumbleweed. (I later tried to rollback and do these steps with openSUSE-repos-MicroOS-NVIDIA installed instead, to no avail)
Next, as per the guide, I tried to do zypper install-new-recommends. After installation, I rebooted the machine. Upon login, resolution was forced to low.
inxi -G
has shown N/A in the driver field.
I’ve rolled back via snapper rollback
, confirmed that nouveau drivers are back in place (resolution was back to normal, inxi -G
has shown nouveau
), and tried to install nvidia-video-G6 using YaST. It has automatically installed all dependencies as well.
Upon login, I faced the same issue - resolution degradation and N/A in the driver field.
Troubleshooting for this issue has shown that secure boot may not allow these drivers to be launched without importing the respective key, as listed in the same Nvidia drivers article. However, the file that needs to be imported is not at the suggested location (/usr/share/nvidia-pubkeys/); in fact, /usr/share only had nvidia folder, which didn’t seem to contain any keys.
As a workaround, I attempted to disable secure boot by entering:
mokutil --disable-validation
. A menu appeared on reboot, through which I disabled secure boot. Further launches had “launching in insecure mode” notice.
mokutil --sb-state
output is SecureBoot disabled
.
Then, I tried to install the driver again, as described above. Still no luck, and same issue.
So, what else could be the issue and what do I do about it next? Thank you in advance for any replies!
Solution that worked: instead of going for install-new-recommends, install the following package:
nvidia-driver-G06-kmp-meta
It should be available by default, but if not, add the respective repository by using this command:
zypper addrepo https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/tumbleweed/
Thanks to Björn Tantau! The comment with the solution: https://swg-empire.de/comment/7201260
Trying to install an Nvidia video card in Linux is the 10th ring of hell
It’s worse than having a Roland sound card in the 90s. Every game says they “Support” it, but getting to actually work was always a fucking nightmare.
Really, the best of luck to you.
With many distributions, it’s plug&play now, but some still make trouble out of it.
In the case of SUSE, this seems to stem from heavy open-source advocacy and EU laws coming on top of it, which is respectable, but adds to the complexity of solving issues here and there.
I mean, I get that, but I’m not sure that is the source of your present issues. Like, it’s a thing that that’s worth consideration. We don’t get to just use products anymore. We have to consider where they come from and who makes them. And I’m pretty cool with SUSE and how the Germans do their Linux. It was the first distribution I used after red hat back in, like, 1997. I have a deep love for that distribution. I don’t use it because it doesn’t happen to be the correct distribution for my needs. But I often would like to. It’s it’s a nice distribution, very smooth and professional. OpenSUSE basically the “other” fedora.
Thing: I fucking hate YAST with a goddamn passion. I FUCKING HATE IT. Why do I hate it? Because of everything I just hate it. I’m much prefer to use a APT, despite the fact that it’s incredibly antiquated.
Maybe YAST has gotten better in the last 10 years or so since I’ve tried it, but my God was it terrible the last time I tried
Nah, YaST is still a piece of crap imo, both antique and impractical for most purposes. They should either make it modern and user-friendly, or phase it out.
That said, it kinda helped me to locate the correct system package this time.
In any case, OpenSUSE Slowroll is already my daily driver on laptop, which doesn’t have an NVidia GPU, and it’s part of the reason why I decided to give it a spin on desktop. At the end of the day, the issue got resolved, and now I can keep it, hopefully, in here too.
Yeah, like I said, SUSE isn’t the distro I use, but it is frequently at the top of the list when considering what distrit to use when I create a new server or anything like that. Even for my own personal uses, it was like number #2 on my list.
Thing is, as it happens with a lot of Linux, it all comes down to what you’re used to, what you’re comfortable with. And I am very used to and well trained in Debian-based distributions. Currently, I’m running Pop!_OS on a couple of servers.