The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to disable the default Nouveau kernel driver on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux Desktop.
Disabling the Nouveau driver may be necessary for users installing CUDA on Ubuntu 22.04 or installing a driver directly from Nvidia. In these cases, it is common to receive an error like the one below:
ERROR: The Nouveau kernel driver is currently in use by your system. This driver is incompatible with the NVIDIA driver, and must be disabled before proceeding.
After disabling the Nouveau driver, you should be able to proceed with your installation of another type of NVIDIA driver.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to blacklist Nouveau nvidia driver
- How to update kernel initramfs
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Disable/blacklist Nouveau nvidia driver on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions
- First step is to open a command line terminal and type the following commands in order to blacklist the Nvidia nouveau driver.
$ sudo bash -c "echo blacklist nouveau > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf" $ sudo bash -c "echo options nouveau modeset=0 >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf"
- Confirm the content of the newly created modeprobe file
blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf:$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf blacklist nouveau options nouveau modeset=0
- Enter the following Linux command to update kernel
initramfs:$ sudo update-initramfs -u
- Last step is to reboot your system for the changes to take effect:
$ sudo reboot
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, you saw how to disable the default Nvidia Nouveau driver on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. This is as simple as blacklisting the driver inside of a configuration file, and then updating initramfs to completely purge it of Nouveau. You should now be able to install a different Nvidia driver without encountering an installation error.