NVIDIA GeForce Driver Installation on CentOS 7 Linux 64-bit

This config describes an installation of NVIDIA GeFNVIDIA GeForce Driver on CentOS 7 Linux 64-bit.

Prerequisites

First update your system. We do not wand to build NVidia modules on based on outdated Linux kernel. Do a full updated and reboot your system:

# yum update
# reboot

After a restart we make sure that we have kernel devel package installed matching our currently running kernel and that compiler is installed:

# yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r) gcc

Here is also a good time to visit nvidia.com and download a current NVidia driver. eg. NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.30.run

Blacklist nouveau driver

At this stage we need to ensure that a new propriatery NVidia driver does not get into a conflict with currently installed Nouveau driver thus we blacklist it:

# echo 'blacklist nouveau' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
# dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r) --force

We also temporarily disable desktop manager ( if you ar running kdm that updated the below command with kdm ):

# systemctl disable gdm

Now reboot your system. Next time your system boots it will boot to terminal only with no GUI. As a result it is suggested to take some notes of the bellow commands as you will not be able to access this page with your GUI browser after you reboot:

# reboot 


NVIDIA GeForce Driver Installation

Now we have come to the actual NVidia driver installation. Locate your previously downloaded driver and execute ( your driver version may differ ):

# bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.30.run
Verifying archive integrity... OK
Uncompressing NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for Linux-x86_64 352.30..................................................

NVidia driver is now installed. If you have not configured your X11 during the driver install you can do it now:

# nvidia-xconfig 

WARNING: Unable to locate/open X configuration file.

New X configuration file written to '/etc/X11/xorg.conf'

As a last step enable again your desktop manager and reboot to GUI with new NVidia driver:

# systemctl enable gdm
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/gdm.service' '/etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service'
# reboot

NVIDIA GeForce Driver Installation on CentOS 7 Linux 64-bit