Recently I acquired a new SSD and decided this was a good time to do a full reinstall, take advantage of the SSD and install the driver properly this time around. My earlier instructions were posted here, but I found some better guides online and followed them. For my setup I was on Linux Mint 17 (LTS) and I used the 346.16 Beta Nvidia drivers, mainly because the changelog had several items that looked like they might solve the problems I was encountering before. Although I didn't perform these exact steps in this exact order because I wasn't sure that I was doing, these steps were basically what I did to get the driver installed and working with F@h:
1. Installed Mint, updated everything via the Update Manager, restarted. Note that open-source drivers are in use here.
2. Used Firefox to fetch the Nvidia driver. Renamed it to "nvidia.run" for ease-of-use, and chmod +x nvidia.run to allow it to execute.
3. Control-Alt-F1 to drop into the command-line. Logged in.
4. sudo service mdm stop to kill the graphical display.
5. Tried to install the Nvidia driver but failed because Nouveau was still in use by the kernel. Verified that with sudo rmmod nouveau which indicated that Nouveau was in use.
6. sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf then appended
Code: Select all
blacklist vga16fb
blacklist nouveau
blacklist rivafb
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivatv
7. sudo update-initramfs -u to apply these changes.
8. sudo nano /etc/default/grub and changed "quiet splash" to "text" in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line so that Linux started without a GUI.
9. sudo update-grub
10. Restarted via sudo reboot
11. As expected, Linux booted into the command-line, and no graphical interface appeared. Confirmed that Nouveau was not loaded by attempting to unloading it with sudo rmmod nouveau
12. Navigated to the Downloads directory, or wherever my .run file was.
13. sudo ./nvidia.run
14. Allowed the Nvidia driver to install the 32-bit libs and basically let it do everything it wanted to.
15. Reversed the changes of step 8 by switching the options back.
16. Did step 9.
17. Rebooted after the installation completed with sudo reboot
18. Confirmed that X11 was working, confirmed the installed driver in nvidia-settings, checked "./ocore --devices" to confirm that the proper GPUs were identified.
19. Install F@h, begin folding.
As you can see, it's much simpler than that GRUB hack that I suggested last time. I suggest that everyone follow this when faced with Nvidia .run files. Please let me know if you have any questions or if it doesn't work for you.
Edit by Mod:
Step 4 suggests that your display manager is mdm.
In general, your display manager may also be any of { lightdm, gdm, sddm or another display manager }.